Nathaniel Popkin on the Trepidation of Writing His Latest Novel

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

This week on First Draft, Nathaniel Popkin joins Mitzi to discuss his novel The Year of the Return, out now from Open Books.

From the episode:

Nathaniel Popkin: Women, in my experience, are far more practical, far more flexible, far more adaptable, far less attached to ideology and rigidity and romanticism. They, in my experience and my observation, are far more capable—and this is why I’m desperate to see a president whose female—are far more capable of assessing a situation and making a decision that’s based on the normative facts on the ground rather than some distant idea or ideal that’s controlling reason instead of reason responding to the reality in front of you.

Mitzi Rapkin: Did you have any trepidation at all about writing half the book in the voice of an African-American family being a white Jewish man?

Popkin: I had terrific trepidation, I still have trepidation. I still worry. I still wonder if it’s the right thing to do or if it’s my privilege or my entitlement to do it. I wonder if it’s right.

But at the same time, the Johnsons in this book came out of me. I could not have stopped them from coming from inside of me when I began to set out these characters and figure out how the lives of these two families were going to come together. There was a reality to it that was so strong I couldn’t deny it and it would have been in fact false of me wanting to write a novel about the 70s, particularly 1976, such a year that’s marked with so much worry and so much hope at the same time. I wanted to get into that and it would have been wrong to somehow have ignored the African American experience in all of that.

To listen to the rest of the episode, as well as the whole archive of First Draft, subscribe and listen on iTunes or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts.