A Conversation with Ben Shattuck
BY DAVID RODERICK
Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Indie Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the PEN Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs Davoll’s, the oldest general store in America, built in 1793. He is also the director and founder of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency.
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David Roderick: When I first met you at the general store a few weeks ago, I got the sense that you don’t like the label “historical fiction” very much. Are you surprised — or perhaps even frustrated — that your stories in The History of Sound have been categorized as such?
Ben Shattuck: Well, it’s not so much that I dislike the label historical fiction — more, that I think that category brings to mind something more limited than what it is or can be. When people hear ‘historical fiction,’ they might think it’s something like a story about a passenger on the Mayflower. You follow that character to experience their world — the rotten food, the smells of the cabins, the cold wind and seasickness, the rush of hope in seeing land and that first hungry winter, the strangeness of a new landscape. Or something like that. The character is used as a vehicle to take you back, expose you to new experiences.
DR: Your stories operate much differently.
BS: The historical fiction I write is less about the past, even though it’s set in the past. Like, I usually take the relationships around me (the ones that delight or confuse or confound me) and just toss them a couple hundred years back, see how they sizzle under a new setting and time. The focus there is less on the experience of the past and more on understanding the dynamics of relationships seen through a new lens. I would actually consider any fiction — even set in the present day — that involves history, that considers how history impacts our lives, could be labeled “historical fiction.” The project of historical fiction, set in 1624 or 2024, is to uncover the ways that depths of time work on our lives, our relationships and personalities. The History of Sound, with paired stories, asks the reader to wonder just how far we really are from the past — from escaping even the deep past — in our present lives.
To put it in reduced terms: there seem to be two types of historical fiction. One: the type that you read for the same reasons you’d read fantasy — to be taken away from your life and put in another place and time, and instead of dragons and hooded capes, it’s horses and gowns. It’s an additive process, giving you interesting stuff from the past.
DR: And the other type?
BS: The other type, the type that I enjoy writing and reading, is more a subtractive process, and something far more minimalist. Like, you start rushing away from the present day — ditching the cell phones and email, computers and cars, trains, photographs, antibiotics, lightbulbs — stripping away all the things that a modern-day reader is familiar with. Something like deep-sea diving — descending down and down, into a quieter and darker place, farther and farther, going quieter and darker. What you’re left with, most of the time, is two people sitting in a room lit by candlelight and talking about their relationship or feelings about themselves. In that place, a surprising thing happens: what they’re left talking about is the exact same thing we all talk about in our lives. The love or guilt or nostalgic grief or yearning that consumes our interior lives. It’s like, the more you strip away, the more you see that we’re all drinking from the same pool of human experience, and you suddenly feel very close to these people in the past. You’ve wiped away the dust of our present culture and are suddenly left looking through a clear window, face-to-face with someone from long ago. Instead of escapism, it offers you entrance.
DR: I’m relieved to hear you say that, actually. I was amazed by how contemporary these characters felt to me. Regardless of the time period, it was surprisingly easy to identify with them, especially their regrets and solitude.
BS: That’s great to hear! And I think it’s not just that we connect to the general emotions and feelings across time, it’s that we’re connecting to very specific — situationally specific — emotions. Like, sure, someone from 1890 felt sad, and you do, too. But more importantly, their reaction to, say, being estranged from their father generates the same complex emotions as you’d feel if you were estranged from your father. I seek out those moments when I’m writing plots — in that stripping down process — where I can uncover a dynamic that could be from the present day but is taking place distantly. There’s this story in the collection about a young man, his wife and her sister (all teenagers) joining what is clearly a 17th-century cult. The sisters’ father finds the farm, and tries to convince them to leave, but they refuse, much to their peril. I think for any parent across time, this scene is relatable — the devastation of not being able to help or protect your child as they cross into young adulthood and start making their own decisions.
DR: It seems important to discuss your general store, Davoll’s. Your purchase of the business, billed as “the oldest general store” in the country, clearly connects to your writerly and artistic aesthetic.
BS: Yes! But, I suppose it’s a chicken-and-egg discussion. The reason I write about the past is that I’m very comfortable with it. I grew up going to contra dances before school dances, listening to live fiddle music before I owned my first CD, knowing where to collect mussels and go duck hunting. The biggest event of summers as a kid was when the hay bales would be ready to be stacked, and the whole “neighborhood” would gather in fields, toss the bales in trucks and drive to the barns. In the winters, my friends and I would spend hours walking the ice paths of a forest that flooded. We didn’t have video games.
DR: For the audience’s sake, can you share where you’re talking about geographically? I grew up a half-hour from the region you describe, and we had video games and soccer leagues — and absolutely no contra dancing or haying.
BS: Ha! It’s South Dartmouth. For people not from Massachusetts, I say it’s in the armpit of Cape Cod. For people from around here, I say it’s near New Bedford, where Ishmael went in chapter three of Moby Dick. The contra dances and hay baling really happened in what I guess you’d call my “neighborhood”? About a five-mile radius that, now that I think of it, seems a little Truman Show-y. The mall was a 20-minute drive away — we just never really went there, mostly stayed within the interconnected farms and forests down long country roads. It’s less about the town, I guess, and more about the families that lived in this rural stretch — and who hosted barn dances and kept cows so needed hay for the winter, etc.
That childhood just looked a lot like childhood from before 1950, or maybe even longer ago. So when it came to writing, that sensibility was where I was most comfortable. It became my writerly and artistic aesthetic. And, in a town like this, which supports hay baling and contra dancing, it’s no wonder that we have the oldest general store in America — it’s a town filled with people who like to go there, despite the nearby malls and supermarkets and the rest. My own upbringing would show me how important a New England general store is for the fabric of the community. When my brother and I were looking for a place to open up a country pub, the general store was at the top of the list. Overall, I’d lump an old general store and a book of historical fiction into my “general obsessions” category, forged in childhood. Oh — and I kept the local grocery section and cafe, but expanded the store with a book section and the pub.
DR: It’s a warm, communal space. By the way, it seems impossible to me that you essentially launched and brought to fruition both projects, the story collection and Davoll’s, during (or maybe on the heels of) the COVID pandemic. Plus, you got married! And had a kid!
BS: I’m sure I’ll look back on this time with some amazement. In the past five years, in the middle of the pandemic, I wrote and published Six Walks, wrote the screenplay for The History of Sound, got married, had a kid, opened the general store, and wrote pretty much the entirety of the short story collection — only two of the twelve stories in the collection had been published before. But, as you know, writing favors the experienced and, therefore, the older. Even though my life is packed, I’m just a much more efficient writer now (at forty) than I was at twenty-seven and in graduate school. I had tons of time to write back then, but I didn’t write anything very good. I get to my writing desk at 7:30 almost every morning (because of my toddler), write for a few good hours, and then have busy work all afternoon. The limited time brings some lightning focus to writing, and, after living through my thirties and experiencing events like heartbreak and having a baby and experiencing new love and living so many places, I’ve just got a lot more material to work with when I sit down to write.
DR: Has anything at the store, its atmosphere or antique objects, for instance, inspired any of the stories in The History of Sound? Some of the stories in the book begin with or revolve around a particular object: the phonograph cylinders in the title story for instance, or the remains of a chimney discovered in the woods by the characters in “August in the Forest.”
BS: I wish I could say yes. Maybe someday.
DR: A few moments ago you mentioned a very important structural quality in the collection, which you preface in the book. Before the table of contents, there’s a page with this information, which I’ll share for the reader’s benefit:
HOOK-AND-CHAIN:
A song or poem from popularized in eighteenth-
century New England, in which the first and last
lines rhyme, and within contains rhyming couplets.
As in: A BB CC DD EE FF A
The second half of the couplet often completes
the sentence or sentiment of the first.
I circled back to this information when I was about halfway through the book and realized here that you’re telegraphing the collection’s structure. The second and third stories (“Edwin Chase of Nantucket” and “The Silver Clip”) are paired, or speak to each other over a vast distance of time. The fourth and fifth stories repeat this “rhyming” dynamic, and so on. And the first and last stories braid together the whole sequence.
This is a highly unusual way of arranging (and writing) a story collection. Can you explain how this system came about? When, in the writing process, did you arrive at it? This is a nerdy question, but I feel like I have to ask because I’m a poet, and this book has a poetic sensibility.
BS: There was one story that started me down this path. In Edwin Chase of Nantucket, set in 1796, a man arrives at a farm on Nantucket and leaves a painting before disappearing the next morning. I knew that that painting would be an artistic Chekhovian gun — it would show up somehow, somewhere, but I wasn’t quite sure how or where. It eventually found a place in the following story, The Silver Clip — and then, something in my perspective on historical fiction writing just changed. Like, I started noticing how a natural duet forms between the past and present — there’s the writer in the present and the event or place or people from long ago, resurrected through an instrument of research or imagination.
But that relationship between those in the present and past isn’t static — anyone who has discovered a secret about their family’s past knows this, that you can be changed by the past as it becomes illuminated. So, in my historical fiction, I wanted characters in the present (or across a gulf of time) to be changed as they engage with the past — either intentionally or not.
The question then became: how would they be changed? It seems to me that the history isn’t cause and effect — but, more, impact and radial shockwaves. Something happens, and you don’t know how or who it’s going to affect — but you can be sure it won’t be linear, that large circles of us are connected and changed. Like, in one of my stories, a woman leaves her baby with her brother and sister-in-law on a farm in Cape in the 1880s, which leads another woman in the present day to meet her husband on that same farm. Or in another story, two young men in Maine record folk songs, wax cylinders in the early 1900s, which leads a woman eighty years later to realize she’s made a terrible decision in her life, which has led to her enduring unhappiness.
The collection isn’t broadly interconnected or interlinked as some collections are, but specifically in pairs. It’s a one-two relationship I’m teasing out, that duet, or — per the epigraph — rhymes. Hopefully, when those stories are put side-by-side, something like a harmony forms, a third entity that offers the reader some new understanding of each, and which changes each story as well. I guess it could be called something like perspective.
DR: That metaphor of circles rippling outward through time sounds perfect.
One story that arrives in a radically contemporary form is “Radiolab: ‘Singularities’,” which is presented as a transcript from that very popular podcast, including the voices and gestures of its co-hosts, Jad Abumrad and (the now retired) Robert Krulwich. You emulate all their speech patterns, even the staticky, cacophonous opening of the show. I happen to be a fan of Radiolab, and you follow the format with such care and precision, I confess I checked the Radiolab website to see if the episode really existed. You fooled me. How did the story find that form?
BS: I first just wanted to find any podcast to use as a story form — because there is an argument out there that the podcast has become one of the most powerful narrative mediums of our time. Millions and millions of people listen to Radiolab and This American Life, which are, essentially, short stories — or feature short stories within interviews. I’m a great fan and devoted listener of Radiolab — and so it was just easy for me to hear what it would sound like if I “transcribed” an episode. The story that’s linked to the Radiolab episode is about an extinct bird reappearing on the coast of Newfoundland — which, even when I wrote it, sounded like it would be the subject of an episode on the show. Once I wrote that story, I knew that the “podcast story” form that I’d been searching for had found a source.
DR: The Radiolab story is one-half of my favorite duet in the book. It reports on a photograph of an auk, a species of bird allegedly hunted to extinction in the 16th century. Its partner story, “The Auk,” explores the story behind the photograph, how that photo came to be. Without giving too much away, can you talk about the emotional resonance behind these stories, the longing behind them and others in this book? As in Six Walks, you have a very deep, perhaps painfully deep, desire to connect with what feels like a lost past.
BS: I wrote The Auk first — in the way that many short stories come: it started with an artifact, the taxidermied extinct bird, and from there I simply followed the protagonist through his life. In what way would an extinct bird affect someone’s life, I thought. Where might they be living? What circumstances around their life might have some resonance with a bird that is never coming back? Answering those questions, I found a story about a man and his wife drifting apart through memory loss. I wrote Radiolab not long after finishing The Auk, and with it, tried to show how historical research can mimic that experience of memory loss — the podcaster gets the story wrong just like memory loss erases the past, but both hit on the emotional notes. Both stories circle around forgetting, mending, desperately trying to recover what was lost, finding new paths, and hope. Also, I hope the reader might see that much of the “story” in each is not, in a way, limited to only a section of the characters or the reader herself. In The Auk, the husband fabricates a reality to bond him and his wife; in Radiolab, the missing truth behind the research leads the podcaster toward a happier life.
DR: How do you approach dialogue, especially in the stories that reach back centuries? It must feel a bit like a tightrope walk. On the one hand, you’re trying to evoke an authentic diction and syntax of a historical period. On the other, you want these characters to sound at least somewhat contemporary. Can you talk about that challenge?
BS: I’m mostly trying to write dialogue that doesn’t sound anachronistic or out-of-place, instead of trying to write historically authentic diction and syntax. Constructing dialogue is a lot like constructing historical scenes — I just try not to write the wrong thing about the wrong time or the wrong place. I try to make the scene or the dialogue feel timeless instead of forcefully old-fashioned. Like, in that story about the cult in Western Massachusetts? There’s absolutely no way I accurately replicated speech patterns of a 17th-century New Englander — but still, readers have written to say how spooked they were by the story, how real and creepy it felt. If they felt that way, they, in a way, believed the story, saw and heard the characters as real enough to make them feel something. I tried to make the dialogue of that story, and all the others in the deep past, be clear and uncluttered, detaching from a specific time (with notes of historical accuracy) so that the setting and plot could cement the time.
DR: I heard you say earlier you wrote a screenplay based on a story (or stories) in The History of Sound. If I’m not mistaken, the film is under production. What was the biggest challenge for you in terms of translating your fiction into a screenplay? Maybe we should wrap up by hearing about where that project is headed.
BS: The film was shot this spring — in New Jersey, Rome, and England’s Lake District. Walking onto set the first time in March was nearly hallucinatory, like walking into one of my own dreams: characters that had only existed in my mind were suddenly real people inside spaces I had only imagined. It was shocking, and then thrilling. Maybe it felt acutely bizarre because I wrote the screenplay from my own story, so there wasn’t a single part that hadn’t lived in my mind for some time.
As for writing, in many ways, screenwriting is a simpler task. In fiction, you have to describe the characters, create dialogue, how they react to dialogue, describe the spaces characters move through, describe their thoughts, go into their background, decide on the register of prose for those descriptions, what verbs or nouns or adjectives or punctuation to use in a way that best renders the story, create metaphors or foreshadowing or engage literary devices, and so on. In screenwriting, it’s just two things: where the character is, and what they are either saying or doing. All the rest — interiority, emotions, reactions, place, tone, etc., etc., etc. — are in the hands of the director, the actors, production design, the physical locations, and so on. So — there’s just a lot less to do when writing a screenplay. That said, it felt kind of like playing a song on a guitar with only one string. It’s stripped down, and so much harder in that way. I couldn’t rely on my writing or a character’s interiority to carry a story; only dialogue and the sequence of scenes. The film will be out next year sometime!
