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TOD DAVIES is the author of The History of Arcadia series: Snotty Saves the Day, Lily the Silent, The Lizard Princess and now Report to Megalopolis: The Post-modern Prometheus, which Kirkus Reviews called “A philosophical fable.”

Tod Davies is also the editor/publisher of Exterminating Angel Press and Exterminating Angel Magazine. She lives with her husband, the filmmaker Alex Cox, and their dogs in Colestin, Oregon.

Tod is also the author two cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered.

Ed Battistella: Report to Megalopolis is book four in The History of Arcadia series. Can you give our readers a quick orientation to the world you’ve created in Snotty Saves the Day, Lily the Silent, and The Lizard Princess?

Tod Davies: Arcadia is a land surrounded on three sides by a huge, technocratic, decayed, and power hungry world. How does it maintain itself and evolve? Or does it go under, swallowed up by the greater power? That’s what we’re exploring in all of the books. Arcadia was literally formed by someone discovering who they truly were—and acting on it. The first three books are about how the characters struggle to preserve the values that make Arcadia what it is. The fourth book, though, is told by a character who despises those values, and seeks to replace them with an imperial structure based on the rule of the powerful—with himself at the top, of course.

EB: Readers can read Report to Megalopolis without going back to the earlier books, it seems to me. Did you have this in mind as a stand-alone tale?

TD: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I like to think they’re all stand-alone books—but there’s a rhythm, and maybe some more deep satisfaction in reading all of the books. The same heart, from multiple points of view. I love writing that. Why do individuals think/feel/see the way they do, so differently about the same landscape? How does that interact with other viewpoints to form our collective story? What is the responsibility of the individual doing the seeing, and the acting that comes out of that seeing?

EB: The subtitle is “The Post-modern Prometheus.” How much was Frankenstein on your mind as you were writing Aspern Grayling’s story?

TD: By the last few drafts, completely. It’s weird, hardly anyone notices that Shelley’s monster is the sympathetic one—denied love, denied warmth, denied common humanity. Then he turns against all love, warmth, humanity. We see that happening in our own world when we objectify our fellow human beings, turning them into statistics. Like the historian who said that things are getting better because, percentage wise, fewer people are being tortured and murdered than ever before in history! Wonderful news. What he doesn’t mention is that the numbers are astronomically higher than in the past. But since populations have grown, the percentage is less. You think all those people, our fellows, being tortured and murdered don’t have an effect on the rest of us? Dream on. You know the joke about the kid who’s on a beach littered with thousands of stranded starfish? He doggedly throws them back, one by one, when some guy mocks him—“What good is THAT doing?” Kid just heaves another one in, and says, “It did some good to THAT one.” Arcadia means to build a pattern out of that vision.

EB: There seem to be other dystopian and fantasy influences as well. What other works inform the story, do you think?

TD: Oh, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea tales, of course. All her work is about the treasure of being human, and the responsibility to support our fellows in their human needs and values. C.S. Lewis, same reason, and for his principled love of fairy tales. Tolkien. His yearning for a more human world is palpable. Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Her understanding of the suffering that comes from trying to be more than human—how it leads to being worse than less. Proust. His whole oeuvre is one long fairy tale, about the transformations that happen to human beings, and how we’re blind to them—as if they’re formed in a world outside of our blinkered vision. A world like Arcadia, in fact.

EB: Traditional fairy tales, before they were Disneyfied, had a lot of brutality and ruthlessness. Was Report to Megalopolis a bit of an homage to the origins of the genre?

TD: Oh yeah. More than an homage, I like to think it’s in lineal descent! Fairy tales talk about who we really are. I mean REAL fairy tales. For example, “Donkey Skin” is about a father preying on his daughter. There are predatory fathers everywhere, probably without letting themselves be conscious of what they are doing to their daughters. Fairy tales have known about a father’s incestuous preying on his daughter for centuries. But it’s only coming out now into our common discourse. Woody Allen would not have surprised the tellers of fairy tales. Neither would Report’s Pavo Vale and his desire for his own granddaughter. A very fairy tale subject.

EB: Report to Megalopolis has a lot going on and the narrative captures Aspern Grayling’s confessional voice and his emotions as well, which I imagine was a challenge to craft. What was the most difficult part of writing this book?

TD: Oh gosh. The memory of it is still raw. The most difficult was letting his real pain break through. Man, that was tough. I think that if you read an earlier draft, you’d know I was trying then for a lighter, almost cardboard villain, touch. But the more I wrote, the more I suffered, and the more I knew I was suffering his pain at not allowing himself to be human. That’s happening everywhere, you know. It was happening to me when I was writing the earlier drafts without wanting to go deeper. People deny their humanity because they think that makes them ‘good’ or ‘successful’, or at the very least, comfortable, and then when it pains them, they blame those they have refused connection with—Aspern’s tortured love for Devindra is an example of that. His twisting and turning to get away from any self-knowledge that would force him to understand who he truly is. That he is as weak and subject to human laws as anyone. Contempt is a powerful defense against one’s own weakness. But that defense causes unlimited suffering. And I realized with this book that was what I was writing about, and will write about: how we defend against our own vulnerabilities, and in fighting them, destroy what happiness we, and others, could have. What a godawful waste.

EB: Pavo Vale, the monster, is misogynistic to say the least. Was this aspect inspired or spurred along by the #MeToo Movement?

TD: It’s funny, you know the RESIST image that Mike Madrid created for the earlier books—that was way before the #Resistance movement, but totally in tune with it. Same with the #MeToo movement. All of Arcadia, in the very first book, is formed by a horrible little boy realizing he has given up all his female values to ‘succeed’. And the #MeToo movement is about not having to harden yourself against the sufferings of your sisters in order to get ahead in the pecking order that, up till now, was unconsciously and exclusively built with solely ‘male’ values: dominance, hierarchy, power plays, endless growth. You had to pretend you weren’t being abused if you wanted to get ahead. That’s over now. Arcadia is fighting that battle against Megalopolis. Softness, kindness, commonality: these are not weaknesses. These are strengths.

EB: You teased us with hints about the Evolutionaries. What can we expect in book five of The History of Arcadia series?

TD: Isabel the Scholar kept talking to me, and coming into Report when I least expected it—the voice of the younger generation, the new Evolutionaries, who are forming a new pattern and a new story in the hopes that will preserve and expand the values of Arcadia. Revolution doesn’t work. It needs the opposing side to exist, inevitably strengthening what it fights. The only hope, my young characters feel, is a leap in evolution. And Isabel is a scientist of evolution. I love her. She is my heroine, even though her dearest friend Shanti is the glamorous one. Shanti knows Isabel’s worth. And Shanti and Isabel are going to be grappling with the next great problem Arcadia faces after Pavo Vale has invaded: how to make human what has been created to be inhuman. Which is the problem we all face. Yep. We all face that problem now. I’m thinking of asking Mike Madrid, who does all the Arcadian artwork since the second book, to change the RESIST image to PERSIST.

EB: Can you tell us a little about the artwork that accompanies the book?

TD: Mike Madrid, who does all the Exterminating Angel Press design, as well as being one of its authors (The Supergirls), has done the illustrations for the last three Arcadia books. I can’t say enough about Mike—he always comes up with design ideas that push me to go further, even when I’m writing the earlier drafts. A good example of that is the Luna deck. He’d come up with a few Luna cards, and the next thing I knew, the Luna was a huge part of Arcadian culture. We needed an appendix to discuss it, written by Devindra Vale!

And in this book, my own dear husband, the filmmaker Alex Cox, drew a few maps as if he were Aspern sketching them out—I think they help orient the reader. I’ve always been blessed to have great collaborators nearby.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

TD: Thank you, Ed. And, speaking of great collaborators, thank you for being an essential part of the fast evolving literary world here in Cascadia.

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Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels, including Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Chance to See Egypt, winner of a Best Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters.

She has written a memoir, Occasions of Sin, and a book of essays about her family, Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman’s Life. She is also the author of The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer and Swim: Stories of the Sixties, published by Ashland’s Wellstone Press with a cover image by Ashland artist Abby Lazerow.

Her most recent book is The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on THE LAST DRAFT: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision. I really enjoyed reading it.

Sandra Scofield: It’s great to have a chance to reach your readers. I think of them as slouched on couches, upright in desk chairs, zipping in and out of bookstores– These are my people.

EB: You mention that the book came out of your teaching. Tell us a bit about that and how the book arose?

SS: I have taught workshops at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival every summer since 1993 (I missed two). The topics change a lot, but what students want is essentially this: a set of guidelines to hold on to as they write and revise. They want to go through the process of figuring out how writing works, in the very pleasant environment of the summer workshop. (No sharp criticism here!) So over the years I accumulated notebooks with all my syllabi and handouts, and one day I realized that I had very practical materials that could be organized into something useful.

EB: I’m curious why you focus on the last draft rather than the first draft?

SS: Tons of stuff out there about writing a novel (mostly following ideas borrowed from screenwriting). But Truman Capote aside, nobody writes a first draft that’s good enough to fly. The first draft is for finding the story and getting something down. You may have to do that more than once. “The last draft” is the one where you apply lots of analysis and turn that story all around; where you discover what you were really after; where you amend and reinvent until you have a finished manuscript. I think it’s fun. Not knowing how to write the last draft stops a lot of novels dead. I’ve heard so many agents say they see books that have good stories but poor structure. Or “that needed another round.”

EB: You break the process down to looking, planning, and polishing? I get the feeling you see “looking” as the key element in revision (as the etymology suggests). What should writers look for in their drafts? What does the revision process tell an author?

SS: This sounds counter intuitive but I stand by the assertion: Most writers don’t really know what their novel is about when they draft it. They have some kind of story idea and they have to pursue that to make it solid enough to carry the rest of the weight of a novel: theme, characters, motifs, etc. In revision you have to take a very intense look at what you’ve done so far in order to gain ground for rewriting. You have to be cool about it, self-critical, but also self-accepting and optimistic. The big question is: what is the story? Is it big enough for a novel? If you think the answer is yes, you begin to deconstruct the early work, seeking the best structure.

EB: I was intrigued by the depth to which you discussed the process of summarizing one’s own novel—right down to ways to make notes on the text. How much of this analytic framework –intension, world-making, premise, action and commentary, agency, and threads—did you know about when you first began writing?

SS: It definitely took me a while, but I knew by the end of my first novel (first draft: 1087 pages!) that I didn’t want to write miles of pages again. My first approach was to think through a sequence of scenes, each one on an index card, with a summary line (a “caption”) and notes as I worked through the writing. (I could go back and add stuff to the card, postponing adding it to the manuscript until later.) By the 3rd book, I was really hooked into summarizing (a) the whole book (b) the beginning, middle, and end; and the chapter I was about to write. (I did that summarizing as I approach the chapter.) I think my graduate work in theatre had a lot to do with how I work, because structure is so key to writing plays. And a summary captures and holds the story so you can focus on the writing (developing) rather than the “making up” part.

EB: Are there some things that writers should definitely avoid doing in revising?

SS: I think the worst possible approach is to pick up a page and start rewriting sentences. The worst.

EB: I was fascinated by the breadth and eclecticism of the novels to discussed as examples—Henning Mankell, Donna Leon, Richard Russo, Sue Miller, Mark Haddon, Jane Smiley, Andre Dubus III, Karen Joy Fowler, and of course Austen and Fitzgerald. You seem to read voraciously. Do you think broad critical reading is crucial to the fiction writing process?

SS: Reading is how you get the sound of a novel in your head, and the rhythm of structure. I don’t know any way to shortcut that. It’s why I don’t think screenwriting principles are good instruction for novelists. Yes, you need a “spine,” or scheme for the plot, but you also need the deep breathing of the novel: that capacity for deep meaning, for introspection, and so on.

EB: As a non-fiction writer, I found myself thinking of how I might apply some of the revising techniques. Do you think THE LAST DRAFT has something to say to the non-fiction writer?

SS: Well sure. Learning to focus, really focus, on your intention, your vision, and your subject is key to developing coherence. Mastering structure is like mastering a skill in any profession or art.

EB: You’ve also done a guide called THE SCENE BOOK. Can you tell our readers a bit about that?

SS: I’ll tell you what I hear from people who use the book: I wish I had had this the day I started writing.

I tried to give writers something that isn’t too heady, too nerdy, too precious; but that absolutely stands on structure. It’s filled with examples, models. Fiction is ultimately scenic, you have to master writing scenes. I figured the people who might need a book would be independent writers who didn’t have opportunities for classes and schools and groups, so I tried to talk to “each one,” if you will, directly, kindly, generously, respectfully. What I discovered, though, is that lots of writers in or finished with writing programs snatched it up! They might have talked about scenes for two years or ten, but this book has an accessible vocabulary and clear concepts that demythologize a lot of “talented writing.”

People tell me the same thing about THE LAST DRAFT–that they can hear my voice in it, as if I am talking to them. That pleases me no end, it’s exactly what I was striving for. I want to be a writing nanny. I want to push writers out on their own. I want more stories in the world.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.