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Chapter 1: Who is Karen Russell and what are her notable achievements?
I'm Beth Golay, and this is Marginalia. Karen Russell is a novelist and short story writer with many bona fides. In 2009, the National Book Foundation named Russell a Five Under 35 honoree. In 2011, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her debut novel, Swamplandia, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2013. And her latest novel, The Antidote, was a finalist for the National Book Award. It is an American epic set in the 1930s, immediately following the Black Sunday dust storm. Set in the land of Uz, Nebraska, it has a little bit of everything.
Basketball, prairie witches who collect memories, a magical camera, a scarecrow, and so much more. In anticipation of the paperback release next week, we thought we'd revisit the conversation we had with Karen Russell when The Antidote first came out. You wrote in your acknowledgments that this book in some form or another has been with you for nearly a third of your life.
Can you give a brief description of the antidote and share when and where it began for you? Yeah, absolutely. My friend who's better at math pointed that out to me and I was stunned actually to think about how long how much of my lifetime I've really been thinking about this place and these people.
I was finishing my first novel, which is called Swamplandia, and it's set in the Florida Everglades. And my joke back then was I was writing Drylandia, you know, like set in like this, a very arid time and place. And I think actually it just took writing this book to realize that they're really connected at the root.
I got this image when I was finishing that novel about a woman who was holding this antique hearing aid, an ear horn,
you know if you've seen they look kind of like gramophone horns and someone was whispering something into it and i just i don't know i was like oh i it's going to be a book about these living memory banks and also a collapse of memory i just had this idea of these women who kind of you know they're often marginalized or you know some some they've suffered some tremendous loss that's like sort of torn a hole through them and then they rent that out as storage space essentially so people will come and whisper pieces of the past that they just find unbearable or maybe too precious right something
that you want to put up the way you'd put a keepsake in a vault. And they call themselves the vaults. And so this lady haunted me for a long time. And I knew it would be set during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought.
I had been writing in this first novel about the Dredgenfield campaign of the Everglades, which was kind of a campaign of colonial capitalist expansion through my home of South Florida. So I was interested in that time period. My own grandfather and grandmother worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps. in the Works Progress Administration.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of Karen Russell's novel 'The Antidote'?
I always have too much coffee to prepare for these things. I really loved the way you tied together thematically, I guess, like three of your plot points, because you just mentioned these women had a hole torn in them through loss, but then there was also the deposit of memories into the Prairie Witches' Vault and the documentary photography project for the Resettlement Association.
The latter was run by Roy Stryker, who would punch a hole into photo negatives to reject them, And the witch's customers had holes inside them where their memories were. So there's like three things that have holes in them. And some of these, you know, the images were included in the book, even with the black dot where the hole was. Could you talk about that theme? Yeah, absolutely.
And if some of your listeners are interested or history nerds like me, you can now go to the Library of Congress website. People will be familiar with photographs like Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange and, you know, the photos of Gordon Parks, Walker Evans. I mean, we know these, even if we might not know their attribution. And a lot of what I knew about the Dust Bowl came from this amazing story.
vast photographic archive that begins during the New Deal. And so one of the characters is this photographer, fictionalized, right? Not one of these. These all have gone on to be, you know, some of our iconic photographers.
And they get their start in this unprecedented, you know, state-sponsored, New Deal-sponsored project, you know, sort of designed to, in its inception, really make propaganda for some of these New Deal relief programs and to kind of show the need for and the success of rehabilitation program, you
you know, to give sort of urban America also a picture of the rural poor and the suffering on the plains, which is what this fictional photographer sent to document. I just became sort of obsessed with this project. And there have been some art exhibits around this.
You know, it took me so long to write this book that, you know, it's like other people also became fascinated by this shadow archive. And you can just see these hole punch literally in the beginning, kind of the Roy Stryker, who was the founder, kind of the architect and the director of this program, would just put a hole punch through certain negatives.
And it's not always clear what the rationale for that is. Sometimes it's very clear. It's like, oh, this was the stronger of two nearly identical shots. So he's putting a hole punch to the duplicate. Sometimes it seems like there might've been, it might be like an act of political curation and there's sort of stuff to support that.
Reading in some of the correspondence with photographers, you know, in one letter, he tells Dorothea Lange, take pictures of everyone, you know, take pictures of, the white and the black, but lay the emphasis on the white because white farm workers, they'll have a greater likelihood of being circulated and published.
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Chapter 3: How did the idea for 'The Antidote' evolve over time?
The New Deal is very, very new and controversial. So he has a whole kind of a world of political calculations he's making as well. This is another long answer, but I thought looking at that hole punch through some of the negatives, a practice that his photographers deplored and that he later abandoned. And what's sort of interesting now is to kind of look through that.
I think for me, there's one picture in particular, it's rural pupil by John Vachon. It's this little boy, the hole punched image, the hole gets punched right above his ear. He's sitting in a classroom and something about that really grabbed me. And it was on my desk when I was writing this novel.
And if I had to choose like one image that really is sort of the heart of the heart of this for me, it's this little boy with the hole punched through his ear. And I just found myself thinking a lot about what we never get the chance to sort of know fully. I felt this, you know, I was thinking a lot about the blinders installed in me very young, right?
Or just a very partition way I had, this would be a local example of that, right? Like I really knew the Dust Bowl very narrowly through Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, you know, through photographs like Migrant Mother, I didn't really connect it to other historical events that I did learn about, right? But sort of in a different unit, right?
Like in a different box with a different frame around it. So, you know, the U.S. War on Native Nations, right? I never connected that as a young person to the Dust Bowl or to ecological collapse.
So a lot of the project of this book was really, I really wanted to kind of widen the lens for myself, first and foremost, I needed to do that, right, and kind of consider what holes had been punched, you know, what the way that there are these sort of strategic attacks sometimes on people's
understandings of their own lifetimes, or very deliberate omissions, you know, in mainstream accounts and institutions and textbooks. But then also, some of this stuff can happen. So it's so fast moving, it's so private, it's like in your innermost heart, it's how you carry the secret cargo of your own past, and you might not know the way that in aggregate, it becomes a kind of mass denial.
So that is a little bit about what that whole came to mean for me and also that it could be a portal that it's not all lost right that oh wow there's a line in this book many songs have been lost but not all songs have been lost.
And I think that was really moving to me to like sort of look through that hole and see, oh my gosh, like there are all kinds of living possibilities that I think I speak for myself that I haven't really considered or different ontologies, different ways of living with nature, for example, different practices, different agricultural practices.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored through the characters in 'The Antidote'?
And I think if there is any one takeaway for me from having written the book, it's how important it is to shift out of this passivity or this sort of resigned, you know, that rhetoric of self-justification. It's very familiar to me, right? Like, well, what can I do? Like, what choice do I have? And it's a great question if it's a real question, right?
And I think it's even better if it's what choices do we have? I was talking with a friend about, I was saying, well, what do you say to your students when they feel despondent? That like, they're just, they feel so small in the face of these larger forces. And she sort of laughed and she's like, I tell them to make a friend. And then I tell them to find a movement basically.
I think you probably just answered this question, but, you know, I had so many other things that felt timely, that felt like they were moments of history that would repeat themselves.
Like this is the immigrant story, but not only, you know, the Oletskis moving from Poland to escape the German, but also the Prairie Witches family, which was Sicilian but labeled as Italian because they were lumped together by American-born citizens who did not want them in their neighborhoods. Right.
Or the treaties through which, you know, the Pawnee lost much of their Nebraska and Kansas lands. It felt like a lot of like what's happening in the Ukraine right now. Or, you know, the complaint of taxpayer dollars being spent on government funding photography project. Or how money can make the most heinous acts seem like a sane one. After reading all that, I think I felt more dread than hope.
But do you have a hope for readers of this book? Yes, I think I do. And I'll just tell you what my experience of writing it was. And I tried to transfer some of that to the book. I think I mentioned Judy M. Gashkibash and Margaret Jacobs and Susan Grahalis-Gelica and a lot of other people are working on the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project.
And I would just encourage your listeners to go look at that online. I think I talked to so many people working on restoration in very different ways that all felt sort of in service of the same vision or dream of a future world we want to inhabit. So I talked to here in Oregon, Mimi Castile, she's an agroecologist and she's working on
changing global agricultural systems, but she's also working on making her farm a test case so people can see what's possible when you put organic matter back into the soils. I mean, she was so very clear with me that we don't need to join Elon Musk's space fleet, that actually if you follow the lines and respect the limits of nature, there will be abundance for all.
And I mean, it was wonderful to talk to her. She goes all over the world and speaks at conferences about soil health, which I think is not the sexiest topic to everyone, but became like... so hopeful to me. And part of it was like, oh, of course, we might not need like a carbon vacuum, you know, that the answer is here with us. The solution really is here.
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Chapter 5: How does historical context influence the narrative of 'The Antidote'?
I cold called Pawnee historian James Ridingen. And I was just like some lady named Karen showing up on his phone, like what could be more terrifying? But he took the call. And now we're good friends. You know, a few years later, I went with him and his family. We went on like a road trip through Pawnee homelands in Nebraska. Yeah.
And I got to meet the good people who are involved in the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project. I got to meet people working on the Pawnee Seed Preservation Project. So this corn that hasn't grown in Nebraska in 150 years is growing there again because of these friendships between Nebraska farmers and Electa Hare and others.
who are working on bringing Pawnee corn back to Pawnee lands. I just feel like I met kind of climate activists, young people, my photographer buddy, people who are all sort of really working today, right? To make a better future reality and sort of like the characters in this book.
Like I do feel like in this unlikely way, whatever happens with this book, when it goes into the world, like I have made all these real friends who are doing good things in the world. And it's the long game, right? I think Julian, again, who's an amazing poet and also Chamorro human rights and climate activists told me, he said, you know, we really need longer imaginations.
And that struck me too, right? Like that this really is the work of lifetimes. I mean, if getting the idea for a book in 2009 and publishing it in 2025 has taught me anything, it's that like things have their own strange gestational processes, you know? I find that encouraging and discouraging, right? But like another phrase I love is from Avery Gordon. She's a friend and a sociologist.
And she said, we need to cultivate a patient urgency together. because this isn't gonna happen overnight. And it's gonna take a lot of us working and giving our gifts in a lifeward direction together This book is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. And the land of Uz is from the Book of Job, but we're in Kansas, so I hope you forgive this question.
When I started reading this, I felt like the antidote would be a retelling of L. Frank Baum's story, The Wizard of Oz. It's set in Uz, which is very similar to Oz, but other than the witch, the personification of a scarecrow, a town named Uz, gales, western skies, tornadoes, sepia-toned memories and the mention of home, it felt highly original. Did you take any inspiration from The Wizard of Oz?
Man, I mean, I've seen that in so much copy now, Beth, and I'm like, yeah, oh, I guess that naming the town Oz, it's really, I mean, in the wheel of fortune of it all, right? It's very close to Oz. But I, yeah, I'm sure that book imprinted on me. I think you probably can't have like a scarecrow point of view character without courting that Harrison.
But I think the influence that I more consciously courted was the book of Job, probably. You know, I think there is this farmer, Harp, who is like a reverse joke. I mean, he's a zero yield man. He's really, it would be funny if it wasn't also tragic, you know, eye level. I mean, he's been struggling. He's a bachelor, committed bachelor.
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