Nick Fuller Googins’s “Motivated Individuals” appears in the spring 2018 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses the intersection of fiction and politics in his work, the delicate balance between irony and sincerity, and his suspiciously detailed knowledge of how to build a DIY detonator from nothing but a clock radio and a lightbulb.
Garrett Hazelwood: Where did your original idea for this story come from? Have you ever had a similar “house-sitting” job?
Nick Fuller Googins: My friend’s family has a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard that’s unoccupied most of the year. Opening the house one summer, they found an unmade bed and an envelope with a ten-dollar bill and a two-word note: Thank You. I loved the notion of a considerate squatter, and—like most of my stories—I started with the idea and built around it by asking questions: What does this squatter do all alone in the quiet, off-season Vineyard? Do they enjoy the house? The gorgeous view? What are they escaping from? As for my own career as a squatter, I did spend one summer in an abandoned school in New Orleans with fifty or so anarchists, but that was more of an “Approved Squatting” situation, as we were working for Common Ground Relief. I don’t have the guts for real squatting. What if the caretaker dropped by? Or another squatter coincidently showed up? I’d be too nervous to sleep.
GH: I saw on the Willow Springs website that you referred to one of your stories as fitting into the genre of “political fantasy.” What role do you see politics, and specifically environmentalism, playing in your work?
NFG: When I was a kid, our family cars had bumper stickers like “No Newt is Good Newt” and “I Believe Anita Hill.” In college, I was arrested while protesting the US invasion of Iraq, and I remember my folks being a little ambivalent, like civil disobedience was almost expected of us. In 2015, my wife and I met my mother at Standing Rock for her seventieth birthday because she wanted to celebrate by washing dishes and camping in subfreezing temperatures to support the indigenous struggle. All of which I mention only to say that politics and activism have long played a big role in my life, so I guess I’m not surprised when those same themes keep popping up in my writing. These days, I do a little environmental work with 350.org and some canvasing for progressive candidates, but the real activism I leave to my characters. I love fiction for this opportunity to explore the realm of the imagination and the possible, especially for characters who dream big. Political fantasy, yes, but then it suddenly happens! Like who would’ve believed in 1776 that a group of coastal elites could organize victory against the British? Or even six months ago, that high school kids from Florida would be leading—and winning!—the fight against the NRA? History really can change on a dime. I like how Ursula K. Le Guin phrased it, regarding capitalism: “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” I just hope the same is true of global warming. So many signs point to the conclusion that we are too late, our planet fucked. And yet, as profoundly saddened as I am by the science, ours is the most blindly optimistic species ever known, so I can’t help daydreaming, and writing, of little ways we might somehow come out of this OK.
GH: You have a great ear for colloquialisms, and your story is loaded with so many peculiar details about this fringe group of young activists. From the lingo to the setting to the plans for the DIY detonator, how did you go about researching the story? Can you tell us a bit about your process?
NFG: I spent a good chunk of time involved in many upstanding fringe groups of young activists, so much of this story was a matter of traveling back to when we listened to a lot of Rage and worshiped Chomsky and planned for the revolution and knew with utter conviction that canvasing for signatures was a total liberal joke. To write Teddy and Brett, I took a particularly close look at that time when the bubble of college activism popped and the real work of the real world presented itself in full. I never got as low as Teddy gets, but I remember feeling pretty damn low. It took some years and good advice to accept that most of these fights will not be won in our lifetime. And in the meantime, you have to take care of yourself, which Teddy is learning. The DIY detonator I remembered from something called The Big Book of Mischief, which I discovered online in the early dial-up days of the Internet. I was thirteen and smitten with things that exploded. It was not a good influence, to say the least.
GH: It seems to me that in creating characters like the ones you gravitate toward in your work, there is always the danger of falling into parody. You’re so adept, though, at flirting at the edge of absurdity, while still managing to build a deep empathetic connection between character and reader. What strategies can you recommend for striking a balance between irony and sincerity?
NFG: Thanks a lot for saying that. I try to walk the line with care. A friend and I were just talking about this the other day—the balance between irony and sincerity, and is there even a balance anymore or is sincerity totally dead? Could I, for instance, rock a moustache without a trace of irony? (We decided I could not.) So there was definitely an early impulse to write Teddy and Brett as stark parodies of activists, mostly out of worry that readers would find their sincerity hollow either way. And a stark parody might have been sort of funny, but I think it would have been a cruel humor, punching low. One of my all-star instructors, Tayari Jones, always encouraged us to write towards love. Love is the special sauce, she would say, and I consider that some of the greatest writing advice ever. Whether a friend or sibling or partner or pet or cause or plant or planet, I don’t know if it really matters what a character loves—most of us can connect with people who care about something deeply, who love hard, and, anyway, those are the people I want to be around. So Brett loves his pal Teddy and Teddy loves Mandy and Mandy loves the Gay Head Cliffs and they all love their dying planet, and because of all this love, the three of them are maybe a little easier to empathize with and a little harder to dismiss as simple satire. That’s my hope.
GH: What was your biggest challenge in writing this story? What was the hardest part to get right?
NFG: This story went through something like fifteen revisions, and, looking back, a lot of those revisions struggled with getting Teddy out of his head. Early drafts had the poor guy on a bench by the ferry terminal, just thinking and thinking and thinking, and maybe a better writer could make “scenes” like that interesting, but not me. One thing that helped was ratchetting up the first-person voice to a more conversational tone that addressed the reader directly, which gave Teddy some latitude to withhold information out of shame. It also helped to keep him moving, whether swinging a bat at apples or walking to buy groceries. Another challenge was getting all the global warming anxiety out of Teddy and Mandy’s minds and onto the page, which happens to be a similar challenge that climate activists face in convincing folks to do more about global warming—how do you instill a sense of urgency in something so abstract? The eroding Gay Head Cliffs were a big help in this regard. Now I had something to physically show the change and anxiety that Mandy and Teddy feel. And, of course, the cliffs worked overtime by giving the two lovebirds an excuse for a romantic moment, which was fine by me.
GH: What are you working on now? Do you have any upcoming publications we should keep an eye out for?
NFG: I recently finished my first novel, so right now I’m trying to find it a home. In the meantime, I’m writing a story about a bouncers’ union that goes on strike. I didn’t write anything else while working on the novel, and coming back to the short story has been a blast. I’ve always thought bouncers should organize to form a union. Who would dare cross their picket lines? Nobody! Also, a story of mine, “Drop Zone Summer,” recently won The Masters Review Short Story Award for New Writers. It’s about a Somali skydiver, and it will be published later this spring.
Nick Fuller Googins’s fiction has appeared on All Things Considered and in Ecotone and Narrative. He lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, where he plays trombone in a pickup band of talented brass and woodwind musicians, who are forgiving (so far) of his many missed notes.
Garrett Hazelwood is the interim prose editor at The Southern Review. His MFA is from Louisiana State University, where he was the 2017 and 2018 recipient of the Kent Gramm MFA Award for Literary Nonfiction.
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