Gina Nutt: This excerpt takes place over the course of a morning as a woman works from home with her baby. What brought you to this story? Can you tell us about the book?
Seph Murtagh: The idea for the novel came about when my wife and I had a baby last year, and we were confronted by the insane cost of childcare. We were worrying about how we were going to pay for daycare for our daughter, and there was a hot minute when I was considering trying to do my job from home while simultaneously looking after her, which would have been nuts and probably would have resulted in me getting fired eventually. Thankfully, my wife, who is more practical than I am, talked me out of it, and we were able to figure out a workable solution. But a lot of parents aren’t that fortunate and it really got me thinking about how, all across the country, parents of young kids are improvising batshit childcare arrangements on the fly, juggling work schedules, bringing kids to workplaces, watching kids while working from home, all kinds of wild scenarios, because the United States hasn't figured out a way to properly fund early childcare, the way that we do with K-12. At any rate, the whole experience left me with the germ of an idea: what if I wrote a novel from the perspective of a character who was juggling childcare and her job at the same time? Something that is very applicable to the COVID era, when so many people (and especially women) were forced into this exact situation (although this particular story doesn’t take place during the pandemic). I already had a short story kicking around about a city forester who is struggling to write an urban forestry master plan while being bothered by all kinds of trivial distractions throughout her day, and it was fairly easy to adjust this story to include a baby. I spent a decade serving on the Ithaca City Council, and that experience gave me a solid grounding in the culture and mechanics of local government, so those aspects of the story just kind of fell into place. It made sense to make the character a woman, one, because it's predominately women who bear the brunt of this problem, but also because it felt very natural to me to write this from a mother's perspective. Which is surprising, because I'm not a mother. But I guess that’s the advantage of fiction. As for the book itself, mainly what I can tell you is that it’s unfinished. I realize it takes some chutzpah to publish an excerpt from a novel that doesn’t exist yet (although I suppose nineteenth-century writers did this all the time) but I tend to be pretty closeted and insecure about writing and seeing these early chapters in print is a big help. Honestly, it’s probably the confidence booster that I need to keep going with this project.

GN: The sweeping sentences and Kate’s ruminative sprawl are interesting considering that this story takes place in one room, within a specific timeframe. How did you land on this expansive style given the constraints?
SM: I’m really drawn to narratives where characters are shown to possess a rich interiority while they are engaged in simple, everyday activities, where you get to see a total consciousness lit up while a character is doing something routine, like brushing one’s hair or getting stuck in traffic (or riding an escalator, as is the case in one of my all-time favorite novels, The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker). This is a narrative style that definitely owes something to the seminal texts of modernism – Leopold Bloom rambling around Dublin, Clarissa Dalloway buying the flowers – but I also think that, practically speaking, it captures the way that most of us live in modern society. One of the things that bugs me about a lot of contemporary fiction is that it seems to have completely abandoned the realm of interiority, since interiority is the one thing that the novel can really do well compared to other mediums. There’s a writer named Lincoln Michel who I follow on the various social media platforms I belong to, and he recently posted about this, about how there’s this very cinematic vibe to a lot of contemporary fiction. A character will be shown entering a café, for instance, and the narrator will function as a kind of roving eye, offering a play-by-play account of what the guy at table two is doing, the tacky mohair sweater that the barista is wearing, the miniature Pekinese in the arms of the ornery customer who is ordering a latte, on and on, and meanwhile what’s lost in this storm of external description is what’s going through the character’s head as she moves through this space. A lot of things get blamed for this, from Carver-style minimalism, to the shopworn "show don't tell" adage, to writers retrofitting their novels to encourage movie adaptations. But I think it happens mainly because, as a culture, we are drenched in the visual. It can be hard to show a mind at work, free from the tyranny of observational detail. At any rate, for all these reasons, I wanted to make Kate’s mind center stage in this novel. Her surroundings are pretty simple. I picture her home office as a little room, maybe 10 by 10 feet. There are some obvious distractions, like her screens, the sleeping baby, the orange sky out the window. But otherwise, there’s not much else happening in there.  She’s achieved the prize that Virginia Woolf wrote about a hundred years ago – the room and the salary – but it’s kind of a trap. Meanwhile, her mind is ranging all over the place, sifting through her work obligations but also touching on her memories, desires, fears. The sweeping sentences, the semi-colons and comma splices and parenthetical interjections, are meant to portray the agitations of a mind that is hungering for a certain kind of freedom in the midst of these material circumstances which are severely limiting.

GN: The excerpt reveals the care of parenthood in the face of external risks in the world. Kate’s job with local government puts her between these opposing inclinations. How did these tensions in narrative and theme meld as you wrote and revised? Any challenges as you explored them?
SM: This novel started out as a short story, and my original working title for it was “Flood and Fire” because I was really trying to emphasize the theme of environmental catastrophe, which, more and more, is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, both physically and psychologically. In the novel, Kate has been put in charge of managing public relations on a flood mitigation project and the sky outside her window is filled with wildfire smoke, so the twin threats of fire and water are never far from her mind. As a civil servant, she is clear-eyed about the risks facing her community, and she thinks about them constantly, but you can’t say the same for the people around her. A theme that emerges throughout the novel is that Kate’s neighbors are constantly pestering her about various complaints that don’t exactly rise to the level of emergencies in her mind, overgrown street trees, clogged gutters, beetle infestations, stray cats falling into the creek, things of that nature, whereas the worry that keeps Kate up at night is the city dam failing and causing a catastrophic flood. She has an insider’s knowledge of public works, and she doesn’t have the luxury of not thinking about these scenarios. I have a lot of admiration for the civil servants who are tasked with running the essential operations of government, the basic systems that ensure life and safety. Politicians are mostly jackasses, they come and go, and increasingly they seem to be spending their time debating things that are fundamentally divorced from reality, whereas it’s the people a couple of layers down in the bureaucracy who are the true heroes of government, in my mind. Kate belongs to this class. She’s a creative person, both in her role as a mother and her role as a public servant, but she’s grappling with these larger forces of deterioration that are frightening and beyond her control. Her daughter is a reminder of what she’s fighting for and a source of strength, but she’s got a tremendous amount of anxiety about being a mother, and this isn’t helped by the fact that she’s trying to juggle so much in her life. Some of the later chapters I’ve drafted almost have the feel of a screwball comedy, although it’s a hilarity that is laced with terror. She isn’t blameless. She certainly bears some responsibility for intertwining her personal life with this job, which, after all, is a job that is supported by the taxpayers. It’s a situation that I wouldn’t say is entirely ethical. But you can forgive her a lot. She’s smart. She’s tenacious. She’s funny. I think she’s someone I’d want to be friends with.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
SM: Musically, I don’t think I’m that interesting. I mainly listen to indie rock performed by eccentric Gen X white guys: Silver Jews, Elliot Smith, Guided by Voices, Jason Molina, Pavement, that kind of thing. As for writers, my Mount Rushmore of the Dead is probably Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Laurence Sterne, and there’s a long list of more contemporary writers that I admire. Off the top of my head: Paul Beatty, Kate Briggs, Fernanda Melchor, Thomas Pynchon, Helen Dewitt, Kevin Barry, Lydia Davis, Daša Drndić, David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Don DeLillo, Gwendoline Riley, Garielle Lutz, plus others who I’m sure I’m forgetting. Something else that inspires me: I do a lot of walking. Except for the winter months, when I tend to drive more, I probably walk around 15,000-20,000 steps per day. I don't really exercise, so this is the only thing that's keeping me from an early grave. Most of this consists of routine trips around town, travels between work, my kid's daycare, coffee shops, the grocery store, various parks, breweries, cafes, and so on. I’m really going for that Zen breakthrough that can only happen after you’ve walked down the same street in the same town for the 3700th time. I'm lucky to live in a place where I'm able to do this (the much-maligned 15-minute city concept). I don't think Ithaca on its own is really all that special (there are plenty of college towns like it in the United States) but its location in this very unique landscape, situated among all these glaciated lakes and waterfalls and shale formations, a spot on the earth’s surface that was once at the bottom of a vast sea: this is something that speaks to me in a profound way. The gorges, the geology, the flora and fauna, the way the city bleeds into these gritty outside edges that aren't quite urban but aren't quite wilderness, spaces of wild growth and decaying infrastructure that can feel like a shot out of a Tarkovsky film. Or even just the way the light falls at certain times of year. I take a lot of inspiration from it. If anything, this novel is a love letter to all that.