{"id":15383,"date":"2016-07-21T21:56:22","date_gmt":"2016-07-22T04:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/dave-eggers-sets-his-latest-literary-adventure-in-alaska\/"},"modified":"2016-07-21T21:56:22","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T04:56:22","slug":"dave-eggers-sets-his-latest-literary-adventure-in-alaska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/dave-eggers-sets-his-latest-literary-adventure-in-alaska\/","title":{"rendered":"Dave Eggers sets his latest literary adventure in Alaska"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK <\/strong>\u2014 The latest stop on Dave Eggers\u2019 long-running fictional tour: Alaska.<\/p>\n

Eggers\u2019 \u201cHeroes of the Frontier,\u201d which comes out July 26, tells of a single mother from Ohio who flees to Alaska with her young son and daughter in the wake of financial and personal disaster. Josie is a dentist forced to sell off her practice after being sued by a former patient. Meanwhile, the father of her children is increasingly unreliable and she is haunted by guilt for encouraging a young patient to join the Marines, only to have him be killed in the war in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeroes\u201d is a story of both escape and entrapment. Josie may dream of being \u201creborn in a land of mountain and light,\u201d an adventure worthy of Jack Kerouac, but will instead confront a landscape of fear and menace and learn that she \u201cdidn\u2019t need to find humans of integrity and courage. She needed to make them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 46-year-old Eggers is a resident of the Bay Area, the setting for his acclaimed memoir and debut book \u201cA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,\u201d but has traveled the world and placed the characters in his fiction everywhere from Saudi Arabia (\u201cA Hologram to the King\u201d) to northern and eastern Africa (\u201cWhat is the What\u201d) to Costa Rica (the story collection \u201cHow We Are Hungry\u201d).<\/p>\n

In a recent email interview with The Associated Press, Eggers discussed the settings for his books, some common themes and how the American past connects to his current book, and to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> How did the basic narrative develop and why set it in Alaska?<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> With \u2018Heroes of the Frontier,\u2019 I started taking notes about Josie back in 2011. I knew I wanted to write about a dentist who had two kids, the father of whom was more of a useless appendage than a man. Somewhere down the line, maybe two years into the note-taking process, I had the idea of putting her in Alaska. There\u2019s an unspoken assumption, I think, that Alaska is full of strong, self-reliant, plain-spoken people \u2014 frontier people \u2014 and Josie wants to be among people like that. She wants to be among steel-spined people who won\u2019t let her down.<\/p>\n

In general, I\u2019m inclined to putting characters in new situations, new places. I like motion. In \u2018Heroes\u2019 in particular, I wanted Josie and her kids to be repeatedly challenged by their surroundings, and to get stronger as a result.<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> The book has classic American themes of flight and adventure but at times also seems like a dark and frightening take on life on the open road. Your thoughts?<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> Because Josie is alone with two very young kids, she\u2019s often facing dangers real and imagined. There\u2019s also a hundred or so wildfires burning throughout the state, so there is some very real peril for a person meandering through the state without a plan and without a friend.<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> For novels, do you often travel to places with the conscious thought of writing about them or does that decision usually happen in retrospect?<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> I spent some time in Alaska about three years ago, without any intention of writing about it. But I had this Josie character in my head at the time, and eventually it made sense that a character setting out on an epic journey would find herself in Homer.<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> Do you see your work as a kind of continuing series about life worldwide in the 20th\/21st century? Do you see a thread running through?<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> In some ways, I was hoping with \u2018Heroes of the Frontier\u2019 to examine the American psyche, and our connection \u2014 if there still is one \u2014 between our pioneer past. Josie and her kids don\u2019t seem to have anything in common with the heroes of the frontier of the past, but then again, maybe they do. Maybe there\u2019s something in the blood \u2014 barbarian blood, I think \u2014 that connects an American dentist with the explorers, thieves, cowboys, settlers, winners and losers in American history. <\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> You recently wrote a piece (for The New Yorker) on Donald Trump and his appeal.<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> My very subjective view is that Trump\u2019s popularity has less to do with his xenophobia and more to do with his presumed business acumen, his status as a reality-TV star, and his candor. But the fear we live with as Americans is very real \u2014 unnatural and irrational fears are stoked in the television media every day, and lead to assumption that we all need to be armed and ready to stand our ground. We\u2019re so civilized and progressive in so many ways, but our gun culture is barbaric, paranoid, and puzzling to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Related stories:<\/p>\n

All Juneau’s a stage for upcoming Shakespeare First Folio exhibit<\/a><\/p>\n

Months later, Juneau residents displaced by fire long for home<\/a><\/p>\n

Elfin Cove wants hydro<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 The latest stop on Dave Eggers\u2019 long-running fictional tour: Alaska. Eggers\u2019 \u201cHeroes of the Frontier,\u201d which comes out July 26, tells of a single mother from Ohio who flees to Alaska with her young son and daughter in the wake of financial and personal disaster. Josie is a dentist forced to sell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":15384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-15383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15383"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=15383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}