When Karen Russell needs a quiet place to write in her house in Portland, Ore., which she shares with her husband, Tony, and their young two kids, she heads straight for her husband’s office. “It’s the only calm and serene room,” Russell says over Zoom. “All the other rooms have been overtaken. Like you would just be making uncanny eye contact with an Elmo doll or a stuffy. My own office is an explosion of child art. So my husband’s office has become our office.”
For Russell, spending time with books—whether writing or reading them—is a nourishing experience that’s bound up with love. “Books have always been an antidote to loneliness, offering the most radical intimacy with another consciousness,” she says. “I don’t know how I would have survived to this age without books and the worlds they make available.”
Influenced by a wide range of authors, from Italo Calvino to Carl Hiaasen, Russell excels at conjuring imaginative landscapes that play with fantasy and reality. A MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, she’s the author of five previous works of fiction, including the 2011 debut novel Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the story collections Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Orange World. Together her books have sold more than half a million copies, according to her publisher, Knopf, and have been translated into 16 languages.
Russell’s new novel, The Antidote, her first since Swamplandia!, is a fantastical epic set in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., during the Dust Bowl that’s bracketed by two real events: the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River months later. The novel features real 1930s archival photos and a cast of intersecting characters: the prairie witch who’s paid by residents of Uz to remove their unpleasant memories and secrets, which are then “deposited” into her; Harp Oletsky, a Polish American wheat farmer whose land is inexplicably thriving while everyone else’s has become dust; Dell Oletsky, Harp’s teen niece, a basketball star who moved in with her uncle after her mother was murdered; Cleo Allfrey, a government photographer sent to document Dust Bowl devastation; and a sentient scarecrow, stuck out in a field. “I’d been thinking about writing The Antidote in one form or another for a third of my life,” Russell says. “I wanted to write about a collapse in memory. That was the kernel.”
Jordan Pavlin, Russell’s editor, calls The Antidote a book only Karen Russell could write. “In addition to her superlative gifts as a storyteller, she’s one of the greatest people,” notes Pavlin, who says she’s struck by the author’s joy and creative energy. “She’s like a human cartwheel.”
Russell was born in 1981 in Miami—“a porous green dream of a place,” as she describes it, that lit up her imagination. When she was 11, Hurricane Andrew hit, severely damaging her family’s home—her parents rebuilt, but the event left a mark on the author, who often writes about humans’ relationship to the natural world. “We all exist with the weather,” she says, “and in a disaster, some communities have the resources to go on, while others are blown off the map.”
She left Florida in 1999 for Northwestern University, where she earned a BA in English and Spanish in 2003, and where she saw snow for the first time. (“I woke up my dorm and said, ‘Look at this magical substance!’ ”) She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2006, and over the years has taught literature and creative writing at a variety of schools, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Williams College.
As the mother of an eight-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter, Russell says she used to love writing at night, but not anymore. “The night is lost to me because of the kids,” she says. “I’m on nightmare patrol and support.” Still, she delights in motherhood—when she’s not getting editorial notes: “I thought bedtime stories would be the part of parenting I’d be good at, but they’re booing and shouting changes.”
And while Russell’s kids may not appreciate it, the author is a short story virtuoso whose characters linger in the mind—whether she’s writing about married vampires in Italy or a hilariously misguided young man who falls for a 2,000-year-old bog girl. “I have a bouncy imagination and like short stories because you can have a crazy premise that you don’t need to sustain for a trilogy,” Russell says. She’s currently working on a screen adaptation of her Depression-era female adventure story “The Prospectors” with her husband. “I wrote a story once about presidents reincarnated as horses. I loved it, but I’m sure readers are grateful it’s not 400 pages.”
As The Antidote unfolds, the prairie witch discovers that she has lost her ability to return her customers’ memories to them when they ask for them back. After she takes Dell on as an apprentice, the two attempt to handle the problem by feeding made-up memories to customers—leading the pair down a treacherous path. Meanwhile, Harp struggles with his past and the legacy of his family’s migration to the plains, and how they came to occupy land that once belonged to Indigenous peoples, while Cleo gets close to Harp and Dell and sharpens her skills as a photographer—as more bad weather looms on the horizon for everyone. The novel—about memory, community, and history—examines how we view our past, and how we both hide from and face it in the present.
“I’m interested in the fantasies that cover up real histories,” Russell says, “and the crimes of memory that prevent us from reckoning with our past and envisioning alternative worlds.” The author traveled to the Sandhills and eastern Nebraska as part of her research and talked with soil ecologists, Native historians, and activists as she explored issues around colonial capitalist expansion and violence and the theft of Native lands. “I started to understand that social and ecological justice are inseparable,” she says. “Soil isn’t a sexy topic, but it’s the base of our existence. I hope this novel can help widen the aperture, shift the focus, and extend the timeline of how many of us hold the history of the Dust Bowl, and its implications for our shared future on this planet.”
Denise Shannon, Russell’s agent, praises the author’s ability to keep hitting new creative heights. “There’s magic in Karen’s writing,” Shannon says. “Her language gets to me. The beautiful sentences. There’s something visual, almost painterly about her work.”
And Russell can’t wait to share The Antidote with readers. “On a cellular level, I learned and remembered that it’s fatally lonely to deny that our lives are connected at the root,” she says of what writing the novel taught her. “Sometimes fantastical conceits can illuminate something deeply real.”
As Russell reflects on the book, there’s a knock on the office door. Her husband pops in to tell her something. “He’s never getting his office back,” she says after he leaves. Not today, at least. Russell has work to do.
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
