A Conversation with Scott Alexander Howard
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. We’re so happy to have The Other Valley as our March Book of the Month!
With The Other Valley's release in the UK this month, I’d love to know how your experience as a debut author has been so far and how it feels to know your novel is being read around the world?
First, thanks so much for choosing The Other Valley as your book of the month! I appreciate the international angle of your question. I’m originally from a tiny Canadian town at the base of the Alaska Highway, so it’s a thrill to see my novel making its way around the world. One of the classic debut author experiences is the weird sense of separation you feel from a story that was, for years, exclusively yours. Looking at photos of it now in Europe and Asia and Australia, it’s almost like looking at a family member’s photos from her travels; like someone who I grew up with has left the nest.
Before I get into some questions on the book, could you give any readers who are yet to read The Other Valley an overview of what they can expect?
Sure. The Other Valley takes place in a small town that’s physically neighboured by its own future and past. If you hike across the eastern mountains, the exact same town reappears, but there, it’s twenty years ahead in time. If you go the other way, the town is twenty years in the past. Basically, picture an endless horizontal chain of identical valleys. Traveling through time is as humble and unflashy as walking from one valley to the next: there’s no time machine or portal or mutation, just geography. But because interfering in the past could radically alter the future, traveling between these valleys is rarely permitted. One of the only reasons it’s allowed is for a kind of mourning ritual: if you’re grieving, you can petition to go and anonymously view your lost loved one in a version of the town where they’re still alive. The story of the book follows a shy sixteen-year-old girl, Odile, who notices some of these visitors from the future near her school, but against protocol, she recognizes them and puts together which of her classmates must be about to die. She’s forbidden from warning him, but she starts falling in love with him anyway, which sets the stage for a dilemma that eventually tempts her to sacrifice her present to change her past.
I know that your own experiences informed the creation of The Other Valley, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your inspiration and how your initial idea evolved into a complete narrative?
The image of eternity laid out across a landscape, with people walking back and forth to visit their dead, occurred to me while a friend was in hospice dying of cancer. Another friend had died a year earlier, and I think the experiences of grief and final visits must have primed the premise of the book. In my life, those losses led me to abandon my academic career, such as it was. Fiction was always my first love, and now I was confronting how little time any of us have to do the things we really love. So the themes of mortality and transience and roads not taken were very much in the air during that period. Then, after I’d thought up this world, I knew I wanted to follow a character whose story was gripping in its own right, rather than rest all of the book’s appeal on a high-concept premise. It was Odile’s story that let the narrative evolve and deepen.
When I found out that you have an academic background in the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature, it made a lot of sense! However, even though there is a lot of philosophical depth to your book, it never feels unapproachable or dense – how did you approach the challenge of bringing philosophical ideas into your work without compromising your style?
It probably helped that my philosophical work was already quite literary, so there wasn’t a huge leap when I switched to fiction. My PhD dissertation was about the emotions, and it dealt with novelists like Proust and Woolf and poets like Charles Wright and Bashō. In retrospect, it reads exactly like the dissertation of somebody who’s about to quit philosophy for literature. So, to whatever extent philosophy creeps into my fiction, thankfully, it’s not the dry or dense stuff! I’d say that the philosophical influences I can detect in The Other Valley are more ambient. There’s a sensitivity to existential themes and maybe a taste for thorny ethical dilemmas–but those are obviously elements you find in lots of literary fiction.
In a similar vein, I’d love to know more about the process of your world-building. I got the sense that a lot of background work went into creating such a complex set of rules and structures, but you somehow made it very easy for the reader to drop into a speculative world and accept it as reality. How did you approach the balance of informing the reader while maintaining a sense of clarity?
A risk with speculative fiction is having it feel ‘world-heavy’ or overly expositional. To try out an analogy, I own this instrument that’s a hybrid between a normal guitar and a bass guitar (it’s a version of what Robert Smith played in the ‘80s). One of its features is a handy ‘kill switch’ that gives you the option of preventing most of the bassiness from reaching the amp, so if you’re playing full chords, they won’t sound overwhelming. There’s a figurative kill switch in The Other Valley that prevents too much exposition from overwhelming the text, and it’s the first-person perspective. Having one character narrate the novel automatically keeps a lot of worldbuilding from reaching the page, either because the narrator doesn’t know certain facts about her world or because lots of the facts are irrelevant to the story she’s telling. Odile only really goes into detail about the aspects that need to be clear to tell the story at hand, and beyond that, she’ll sometimes evoke or imply the rules or history of her world without explaining them explicitly. I like that kind of ‘gestural’ worldbuilding because in the real world, we also assume a large degree of shared background knowledge when we tell each other stories, so that tone lends naturalism to the book. But these strategies might’ve been harder to use if I’d been writing an omniscient narrator.
Read the rest of the interview in the Spring edition of nb notes. Sign up here by 31st March to get a copy.
Editorial Picks
