“How seldom you recognize the start of things.” ~ Fetzer
in Parts Per Million by Julia Stoops
It’s true, hindsight is 20/20, that life moves along a trajectory of cause and effect, and that history often repeats itself. We witness as much when we turn on the TV or scroll through internet feeds and see familiar threads of concern: a loss of rights, a washing of facts, a nation on the brink of war.
We have been here before.
Julia Stoops’ debut novel is a story about that time before. Set in the early 2000s, Parts Per Million (Forest Avenue Press, 2018), tells the story of three activists–Nelson, Jen, and Fetzer, as they work to make known one environmental injustice after another. But their small operation, Omnia Mundi, falls under the eye of bigger watchdog when they uncover a local university in quiet partnership with the government to create military technology.
What unfolds is a complex story of resistance and risk and the constant effort to find balance, an effort that means re-examining the core in order to build a stronger foundation.
I’m honored to host Julia for an interview about her novel. And there’s a giveaway! CLICK HERE (by Tuesday, April 24th, for a chance to win a copy of Parts Per Million.
Now, welcome Julia Stoops!
Christi Craig (CC): I understand your novel has been several years in the making. But even with a stretch in the journey from first draft to publication and the fact that the subject itself centers around events that happened well over 15 years ago, much of this story remains current in themes and in dialogue, and (as Fetzer says) how “fear clings to the status quo.” Writing is magic, and we can’t always know how well a story first conceived in years past will reflect our present day. Are you surprised at how apropos your novel is to today’s political discourse?
Julia Stoops (JS): Writing is magic! And indeed, I am very surprised. By mid-2016, when Forest Avenue Press acquired the manuscript, I naively thought the fascist-leaning Bush administration was an aberration we had put behind us. I pitched Parts per Million as a story about a group of activists during a particularly messed-up time in our history, trying to hold onto their ideals while their world falls apart around them.
It got rejected by a lot of agents in 2011 and 2012 — one even explained they didn’t think the topic was relevant to contemporary readers. That coincided with Occupy, by the way, so the reasoning was absurd, but many liberals assumed the improvements we enjoyed on the domestic front during the Obama years were going to continue. The MS was even shortlisted for the PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, but, as time moved on, the subject matter gradually slipped into a category you could call “recent history we’d collectively rather forget.”
Laura acquired the MS because she loves the characters, and she wanted a realistic novel set in the recent past. I don’t think either of us realized how pertinent the themes and topics would become after the 2016 election.
That day after the election, I was leaving my downtown workplace to head home for the evening, and I recognized a familiar sound. I could hear it from blocks away, the chanting of people taking to the streets. Helicopters thrumming in the sky. The sound of the craziness returning. And it hit me: My novel is relevant again. Unfortunately, disturbingly relevant.
CC: Nancy is a minor character but a powerful voice within the story as a whole when she confronts Nelson, Fetzer, and Jen about the racial disparity within organized protests. ‘Those rallies of yours are all organized by white people,’ she says. ‘They don’t come into the black communities and let us in on what’s going on, or ask us to get involved.’ What might her character say in response to protests of our time–the Women’s March, March for our Lives, or maybe even activism on which mainstream media tends to ignore?
JS: The phenomenon of mostly white people marching together for liberal causes is still going on. But the difference is now more white people are noticing and starting to understand what it means. And there have been occasions where white and black people have come together such as the Black Lives Matter protests. However, systems, including the mainstream media, are slow to evolve.
For instance, Marjory Stoneman Douglas has gotten a terrific amount of coverage, and I’m glad of that. But it’s in Parkland, an affluent suburb. Now don’t get me wrong, I love March for Our Lives, and I deeply admire these young people who have been catapulted by tragedy onto the national stage, and are getting media coverage and their photos on the cover of Time, and adults on social media saying “These kids are gonna save the world when we couldn’t” (or didn’t.) The MSD survivors are saying some very sensible things and god knows we need some sense right now. I, too, want to believe in these kids as our upcoming thinkers, doers, society-shapers. They are amazing people! But they were handed the microphone because they’re light skinned and middle class. The keepers-of-the-microphone can relate to them because they’re like their own kids. When poor black kids are catapulted by gun-violence tragedy – as they are so very, very frequently – they don’t automatically land on the national stage. When they protest, they don’t get handed the microphone. And when they protest louder, they get vilified.
But the conversation is starting to shift. I am heartened to read that the new, post-MSD gun-control movement is expanding the spotlight beyond mass shootings in suburban schools, to include gun violence in urban communities, and is really connecting with those communities. I hope it becomes a strong, multi-racial coalition.
And I hope the mainstream media continues to hand it the microphone, regardless of the color of its spokespeople. Some time after the tragedy, it came out in the media that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High is 25% black, and that those kids’ voices were being pretty much ignored. But the students who are getting the attention seem to be acknowledging their privilege and working to include other voices, and that give me hope. (image above: samrodgers2 on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC)
As Fetzer says in Chapter 60: “you’re the future, young woman. Guys like me, time’s coming when we step aside because you’re the energy and the hope and you grew up with your feet in enough different worlds that it doesn’t occur to you there’s any barriers till some idiot reminds you he still believes in them.”
CC: Later in the book, Nelson tells a group gathered in protest, ‘Democracy is getting together in dialogue. It’s taking turns at the microphone.’ This line not only describes the change that he and Fetzer and Jen desire as they take in Nancy’s words, the line also highlights the structure of your novel. The story is told from the perspectives of Nelson, Fetzer, and Jen individually but the chapters are written in different POVs: 3rd person for Nelson with Fetzer and Jen in 1st person. Can you tell us a little about your decision to write the story in such a way?
JS: Stories told from multiple points of view have always fascinated me. When I learned about writing in voice, a world opened up.
First of all, it’s challenging and liberating to remove yourself as the authorial voice and speak as another character. It forces you to reconsider every single sentence from the perspective of someone who is not you.
Secondly, I love the narrative device of a story told with incomplete and sometimes unreliable or conflicting accounts — as a reader I like to sort it all out and decide what to believe and what to doubt. So it was natural to explore that device in my own writing.
Thirdly, there’s something democratic about telling a story from more than one point of view. It’s a way of working with the idea that there is no single right perspective. No person’s account carries more authority than another’s, and although we share a tremendous amount of experience, our subjectivity is the place where existential questions get interesting.
The characters’ formal POV choices relate to their personality. Jen is impulsive, angry, and quick, so we get her in 1st person present, in “real time,” so to speak. Fetzer is the oldest and wisest, and he has processed the events of the story. Thus his version of the narrative is retrospective, in 1st person past. Nelson’s POV is in the present, but the novel opens with him in a state of simmering crisis about the decisions he’s made and where he’s heading. His voice is in 3rd person, which adds a little bit of distance, or disconnect, to his version of the narrative.
CC: You are an artist as well as an author and even created the image for your book’s cover. How do you see art and literature working together to advocate or educate on the personal or political?
JS: My mind immediately jumps to Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden, which I recently read and loved so very much. I want to read more graphic journalism because I see a real potential there for art and writing working together to communicate complex ideas more powerfully than visuals or words can do alone.
In my own art practice I have done overtly political work, but it’s not on my art website because, well, it confuses people when you do different things, they don’t know how to label you, or what to expect next from you. So I’ve curated my art website to only show the process-driven paintings. Included there is a series I did about 15 years ago that features the Parts per Million character John Nelson, and it’s a piece from that period that’s on the cover of the book. But at the time Nelson was more of an “everyman” symbol I was working through. My paintings are mostly abstract and symbolic. They are like dream imagery, obscure even to me at times. My visual art comes from a different place than the writing.
But, being visually oriented, I wanted Parts per Million to have illustrations! I engaged Portland artist Gabriel Liston, who works realistically, to create illustrations for the novel. Friends asked me why I didn’t illustrate my own novel, but, mine’s a different kind of process, a different kind of art. Parts per Million needed a storytelling realist with a strong sense of history. Gabriel created seven illustrations plus three character portraits that head the chapters they represent. I hope the illustrations add a little extra depth and help readers connect with the story in a richer way.
CC: What are you reading these days?
JS: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I moved to the US as an adult, so I didn’t get US history in school. I’m trying to understand the history of power and of dissent in this country I’ve also been reading a lot of Chris Hedges to that end. His view is more global: how do people respond to oppression? What happens when they do? How do states gain so much power (hint: in non-coercive democracies, liberal capitulation is to blame.) And what causes them to fall? Hedges’ perspective, informed by 20 years as a foreign correspondent in conflict zones, is frightening and fascinating. I’m also trying to understand war. Why oh why does it keep happening? Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is eye-opening.
Other excellent books I’ve read in recent months about the Iraq war, specifically, include Eat the Apple, just out from Matt Young, Fives and Twenty-Fives by Michael Pitre, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, and like I mentioned, Sara Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts, about the role of journalism in the context of war and imperialism – which is a major background theme in Parts per Million.
~
Julia Stoops was born in Samoa to New Zealand parents, and grew up in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Washington, D.C. She has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1994. She has received Oregon Arts Commission fellowships for visual arts and literature, and was a resident at the Ucross Foundation in 2016.
