Karen Russell on What Natural Disasters Can Reveal About the Human Condition

Karen Russell’s first novel, Swamplandia!, set in swampland Florida, is a haunting, alluring phantasmagoria, filled with vivid wordplay and imaginative energy. Her equally surreal second novel, The Antidote, offers an even more spacious vision. She traces a group of townspeople living in a tiny Nebraska town over the months that begin with the monstrous 1935 dust storm that came to be known as Black Sunday and ends with another historic disaster, the flood of the Republican River. What planted the seed for this Dust Bowl story? I asked her. “While I was finishing my first novel, I got an image of a woman holding up a shimmering green earhorn, while a stranger whispered his secrets into it, ‘depositing’ a memory inside her. I imagined her as a human ‘Vault,’ someone who stores memories for her customers—terrible things they can’t bear to go on knowing, beautiful things they want to preserve for safe-keeping. That was the original seed of The Antidote.

“Two of the novels that had a huge impact on me as a young person were John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I loved both books, and I think they spoke to me deeply in part because of our family’s experience during and after Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 storm that leveled South Florida. My siblings and I went to live with our great aunt in New Castle, Pennsylvania while our parents salvaged what they could from our flooded home. That disaster was an early education in the power of the weather to shape and unmake people’s lives. It was also a lesson in manmade disasters. I learned that in America, ‘luck’ can be synonymous with money in the bank, and that certain policies tilt resources and advantages to some groups and away from others. Our family received insurance money and had savings that helped us to rebuild; many other people were unable to do so, and some communities were quite literally swept off the map.

“Several lifetimes ago, when I was finishing Swamplandia!, I started sketching out a novel set in an imaginary town that had just been hammered by the Black Sunday dust storm. I wasn’t familiar with the Republican River flood growing up, but when I learned about it, I was struck by the proximity of these two extreme weather events, temporally and geographically, as well as their Biblical scale: walls of earth and walls of water. They felt like the right bookends for this particular story, in which Harp’s trajectory riffs on the Book of Job, his bubble of strange luck swelling and bursting. One thing that connects this extreme weather in western Nebraska to our own is how starkly it reveals our vulnerability and our interdependence. This year alone, so many thousands of people have lost or been displaced from their homes by fires, floods, and storms.

“The Dust Bowl has always fascinated me, and as I researched, I learned I’d grown up understanding it very narrowly. I hope The Antidote can shift the focus and widen the aperture for readers. The word ‘apocalypse’ also means a revelation, an uncovering. I was interested in what this disaster reveals—what truths come to light, what injustices and possibilities are laid bare in the aftermath of a storm. Most fiction begins with a disruption to the ordinary rhythms or equilibrium (however tenuous) in a life, a community, a society. Something felt perverse and correct to me about beginning this novel with a prairie witch who wakes up bankrupt, in the middle of this ‘black blizzard’ of dust.”

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Jane Ciabattari: “Black Sunday began as a gash in the western sky, growing wider and wider and spilling down dirt instead of blood,” you write. And “Imagine every ghost rising up to hurl their cemetery earth at the living. That was the sound we heard last Sunday afternoon. At 3 p.m. the sun was murdered in cold blood, in full view of every woman and child. The sun sank into black cloud. Buried alive, at a shocking altitude, by the duster to end all dusters.” What sort of research was involved in writing such vivid descriptions of the dried-up land, the frightening windstorms, Black Sunday and its aftermath?

Karen Russell: These awesome and terrifying dust storms are permanently etched into our collective consciousness thanks to the work of New Deal photographer Arthur Rothstein. I also looked at dozens of amateur photographers’ chilling snapshots of tsunamis of black dust rearing over their towns and farms. I read many diaries (Lawrence Svobida’s Farming the Dust Bowl, Anne Marie Low’s Dust Bowl Diary), watched documentaries, and read analyses like Hollerman’s and Donald Worster’s The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. I was also fortunate to visit with some incredibly generous Nebraskans who were willing to share their knowledge and family stories with me.

JC: You open the novel by introducing Harp Oletsky, the son of Polish immigrants, and his first memory. He’s age six, and horrified as he’s expected to take part as townspeople slaughter the wild jackrabbits who “chew through rangeland and cropland, who eat the golden wheat…” How did you develop Harp’s narrative? And tie it up so neatly at the end?

KR: Harp is a shy bachelor pushing fifty, an unsuccessful dryland farmer, who I pictured as a good man with an incomplete understanding of his own history. His first memory, the horrific jack drive, is the book’s prologue. But adult Harp doesn’t remember any of it; decades earlier, his father took him to a prairie witch and made his son deposit this nightmarish memory. As a younger person, Harp believed his family was cursed because of the tragedies and failures they endured; in midlife he understands that most of his neighbors have suffered unspeakable things, and realizes “my neighbors are not cursed by God. They are like me: alive.”

I first conceived of Harp, many years ago now, as a kind of Job-in-reverse—he’s the only farmer in Uz whose crops are spared on Black Sunday. Storms seem to swerve and miss him; his wheat is growing even though the skies are dry. Harp finds his run of strange luck disorienting and frightening. “These blue skies scare me worse than any storm,” he says. He’s also seeing strange lights in his fallowland at night, and he’s questioning the evidence of his senses, wondering how it’s possible that his wheat is growing tall when no rain has come. Just as Job struggles to understand the plagues and sorrows that befall him, Harp wonders why his land seems to exist in a bubble of luck. He worries that what seems like a blessing might be a curse, or a punishment of some kind.

Although certain mysteries persist—for me at least—long after the final page, I did want to bring Harp to a new threshold, and a radically altered understanding of what his fortune might mean. I’m glad that you felt that his narrative came to a satisfying conclusion. (I’m grateful to my husband, who suggested moving those final lines from where I originally had them—several pages earlier—to conclude Harp’s section and the book.)

JC: Your narrative delves deeply into the origins of Antonina Rossi, the prairie witch known as The Antidote, beginning when she was a fifteen-year-old fugitive from the Home for Unwed Mothers. You first use the word “antidote” when she remembers nursing her newborn son: “You cried out and I realized with wonder that I was the one You were calling for. I was the answer to your question. The antidote to your distress, your fear, your ravening hunger, your life-thirst.” What inspired her name and your book’s title? When did you settle on it?

KR: Oh, Jane, I wish I could remember! It’s an irony of this particular novel that the book’s own origins feel a little enshrouded in dust to me now.

I started writing this version of The Antidote during the pandemic, shortly after the wildfires that thickened our own skies with dust. I had a baby daughter and a three year old son, and so that animal sensation of being an antidote to an infant’s distress was not even a memory, it was the story I was living then.

I can tell you that I remember writing those lines very early. I knew she was “The Antidote” before I discovered she was Antonina. From the very beginning, I envisioned her as a childless mother, the daughter of immigrants from Sicily (like my own grandmother), a woman who had lost her son years ago, but believes he is still alive somewhere. That loss dynamites a hole through her, a spacious place that she now rents as storage to her customers, banking their memories for them. For fifteen years, she’s been keeping a lonely vigil in Uz, hoping against long odds that her son will find her.

There is something darkly comic to me about a woman like Antonina choosing to call herself “The Antidote.” And like so much comedy, it has its roots in something tragic—she’s far from being a living panacea. She’s joined a long lineage of snake-oil salesmen and rainmakers who promised that “rain follows the plow,” whose cons we associate with westward expansion. As her friend and fellow witch tells her, when she shares her new name: “I like it. Makes a big dumb promise.” Antonina sells oblivion as a cure-all—for everything from gas-pains to nightmares to daydreaming to shame—and of course whatever temporary peace her customers gain from making deposits, they have to pay for with the poisoning of their lives. So that’s one dimension of what “The Antidote” means, at least to me. One thing that really struck me, again and again, was how burying the past robs these characters of the chance to heal, to grow, to make repairs, to envision alternatives to “business as usual.” It robs them of the tools to understand their own lives.

As a title for this book, I liked the tonal complexity it turns out to have (I hope!) once you’ve read the story. The way “The Antidote” can feel wry and earnest, comic and tragic, depending on your angle of approach. To me, it’s a title that moves like a weathervane in a gale, gathering multiple tones and meanings. There isn’t any single antidote on offer here (and I hope readers don’t feel defrauded; “The Secret,” this is not). There are more questions than answers.

JC: How did you research the Home for Unwed Mothers, with its punishments, diminishments, and tradition of stealing of the child from its mother, saying the child had died? Is it based on a real place?

KR: What happens to Antonina in this novel is my invention, but some of the terrible things that happen to her and other women at this fictional institution did occur in the Milford Industrial Home for unwed mothers. Much of what I learned came from secondary sources and from conversations, and I’m very grateful to the brilliant historian Broc Anderson for his guidance and insight. Part of the horror story, for me, was trying to think and feel through how these Progressive-era institutions, founded as sanctuaries, could go on to become sites where overwhelmingly cruel things happened to very vulnerable people. During this period, it was illegal to be single and pregnant in Nebraska. Unwed mothers could be sentenced by the courts to a year’s confinement at the Milford reformatory.

“Our noble state of Nebraska can well afford to maintain this institution for our fallen women…” reads a report from 1906. “If these innocent babes were allowed to grow up in the same environments as their parents, thereby increasing various crimes, more money would be spent to support them as criminals or imbeciles in our jails and penitentiaries, feeble minded institutions and asylums, than is spent in the support of this home.”

You can get a sense from that excerpt of the attitudes and assumptions built into daily life at this brick and mortar institution. I wanted to bear imaginative witness to some of the horrors that women endured at places like the Milford Home during this period, without laying claim to their stories. But it also felt important to try and restore a fuller humanity to the women whose lives are often presented as tragedies, or compressed into statistics.

Not long ago, a friend wrote to tell me that he was describing my novel to a stranger who said, “My mother was born there!” (The home operated up until 1954). This stunned me, and it reminded me that I am treading into times that are very much alive for many people. None of this is remote history, it’s still shaping our present, breathing alongside us.

JC: Harp Oletsky’s sister is murdered by a man known as the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer, because murdered women are found with a rabbit’s foot nearby. Her teenage daughter, Asphodel Oletsky, comes to live with Harp, becomes a star basketball player and team captain, apprentices to The Antidote, and searches for the truth about her mother’s murder. Her observations and passionate connections to her team member, her coach, the Antidote, and other townspeople are finely tuned. What were the qualities you focused on when developing her character?

KR: One of my best friends was a basketball star (I played on a team with her in middle school, and I was terrible, but I loved the experience of being on the team). She’s fierce in the way that Dell is fierce, someone who has gotten dealt some hard cards in her life and played them with tremendous skill and courage, one of the most resourceful people I know. But Dell is her own creation. I think she’s made out of some of the grief that made Ava in my earlier novel, but scalding fury, too.

For most of the novel, she’s in flight from that grief—she escapes into this game, into her single-minded drive to win. Her mother’s murder detonated her, and because she’s a scrappy opportunist, she decides that maybe she can turn a profit from the hole it left, just like The Antidote. She believes she might be a prairie witch and inveigles her way into Antonina’s life. Dell grew up fending for herself, and she’s got those alley cat skills. As the team captain, she can be both caring and also not unlike Captain Ahab, so monomaniacal in her quest that she loses sight of its costs to other people. Like all of us, I guess, her best qualities are also some of her worst ones, depending on the context. Love, mutual friendship and mutual desire, come as a great surprise to this character.

JC: How did you come up with The Scarecrow, who is central to the hyperdramatic concluding scenes?

KR: The scarecrow has always been around! I’m laughing, Jane, because that was what popped into my head. It’s been a long time since I got that first idea, but the scarecrow was a part of it. Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (“All I know is what the words know…”) was an influence when I was first dreaming up the scarecrow, and I hope some of that novel’s chattering comedy and existential disorientation inflect the scarecrow’s soliloquies. The scarecrow—or, anyway, the sentience trapped inside the scarecrow—blinks awake after the Black Sunday duster. For most of the novel, that consciousness doesn’t know who or what or why it is.

Many people have asked me about the Wizard of Oz as inspiration for The Antidote. The movie certainly imprinted strongly on me, I vividly remember being terrified of the munchkin coroner, sitting with my grandmother, eating Lipton iced tea mix out of the jar (one way to really solidify a memory, apparently). It’s set on the Plains, there’s a group of unlikely friends, there’s a tornado, there are witches, and you probably can’t have a scarecrow narrator without inviting the reference.  “Uz” certainly sounds like “Oz.” I see how that’s suggestive. But at the risk of alienating my Wicked-superfan nieces, Uz gets its name from the Book of Job. Job’s story is the one I felt in conscious dialogue with here.

JC: Another intriguing character is Cleo Allfrey, a photographer for the Resettlement Administration Historical Section tasked with documenting “everyday farm life and activities” but ultimately collecting an archive of otherworldly images that capture the past—the Pawnees, the Black homesteaders, the White newcomers—and offer a possibility of what might be an alternative for the future. Why did you decide to tell this story through multiple points of view?

KR: One of the novels that I best love is Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and I’m sure this prairie witch owes a debt to John Singer, keeper of his Georgia mill town’s secrets. McCullers’ multiperspectival novel brings the inner lives of its other protagonists to light, and in the process also becomes a composite portrait of the place that made them, the larger forces and attitudes that shape and constrain each of their lives in very different ways.

Toni Morrison’s Paradise is another masterpiece that taught me how a prismatic, multi-voiced novel can get at a multiplicity of truths and tones.

JC: The destruction of soil was a particularly dangerous element of the over-farming of the prairie that led to deadly dust storms and the desperation of years of drought, loss of crops, of land, of income, neighbors leaving town. What sources helped you piece together the elements of dryland farming that contributed to the disasters you write about?

KR: I learned a lot about soil from Mimi Casteel, an incredible forest biologist, winemaker, and soil seer here in Oregon. She taught me that a few inches of fertile topsoil makes everything happen; all life depends on the biodiversity in our living soils. She and many others believe that moving from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture—which is precolonial agriculture, Indigenous agriculture—can be a powerful tool to halt erosion, put organic matter back into the soil, store water and carbon underground, and mitigate the worst effects of global warming while there is still time.

“If there is such a thing as blasphemy against this Life Cycle,” Mimi told me, “it is what we are doing with industrial agriculture.” She explained to me that, during the Dust Bowl, we had reservoirs of topsoil so vast that they could have supported human populations we can’t conceive of…and yet we lost it so quickly.

A 1909 Bureau of Soils announcement declared, “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” As we can clearly see, in the 1930s and today, this is fatally wrong. It can take hundreds of years of photosynthesis, of growth and decay, to naturally create an inch of topsoil. Both debt and greed create powerful financial incentives to ignore nature’s laws and limits.

If we can understand imperial and colonial violence as a driver of environmental disasters, we see different solutions, different pathways to better futures. Colonization is often presented as a kind of parallel or prior atrocity (and as somehow inevitable, tragic yet unstoppable). Yet as I learned from Hannah Holleman’s excellent Dust Bowls of Empire and the work of historian James Riding In, we’re excluding something vitally important from the picture if we can’t trace a line from the Okies, the Joads, the waves of foreclosures and evictions in the 1930s, to U.S. imperialism and the federal land policies—like the Homestead Act and the General Allotment Act—designed to strip Native nations and their citizens of millions of acres and “open” the Plains.

Uz is an imaginary town, set on Pawnee homelands in what became Nebraska. The Pawnees tenure on the Plains predates the arrival of foreign colonizers in the Americas by at least a millennium. Half a century after the forced exodus of dozens of Native American nations from their vast homes on the Plains to small reservations, the soil is blowing and so are many of the newcomers who came west trying to achieve some portion of the American dream. The Oletsky family in The Antidote emigrate to Nebraska to escape a German campaign of ethnic cleansing on formerly Polish lands, only to find themselves in the role of colonizer.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

KR: I’m working on a story collection that will be forthcoming from Knopf in the not-too-distant future, tentatively titled “Perigee.” Although my kids prefer the title, “How Does It End?”

And my husband and I are adapting “The Prospectors,” a short story I wrote about two grifter girls during the Great Depression, into a film.

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The Antidote by Karen Russell is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.