Gina Nutt: What drew you to the desert for this story?
David Nutt: The stillness, the sound, the space: all conspire to create a heightened sense of awareness in those of us who are intrepid – and/or foolish – enough to go frolicking around in such a vast and unforgiving landscape. Plus, the desert is a great place to get lost, to be lost. To disappear. For a young and mostly clueless dude like Hollis, who, in the classical mode of young clueless dudes, is very much trying to find himself, the desert is a playground, a test, and possibly the worst conceivable place for him to be left to his own (rather shaky) devices. He just doesn’t realize it yet. He thinks he’s found freedom, but really he’s immigrated into a new kind of loneliness. The internal/eternal kind. Poor fella.

GN: Hollis, the story’s main character, is living in a motel, which is a fond familiar place from other stories of yours. What finds you circling back to the liminal land of ice machines, mystifying televisions, and awkward desk clerks? 
DN: True, I do love me a stark, spacious, and eerily empty motel. Maybe because it’s a tidy analogue for limbo? A temporary home for temporary travelers, which is what all of us are in the cosmic scheme of things, if I can be a little lofty about it. Motels and hotels have this weird, and perhaps fatal, duality. They provide some respite and solace for the weary, the displaced, the estranged, those in flight, those who can’t find their way home. At the same time, they threaten to trap those restive souls in perpetual in-between-ness. Once, as a young clueless dude in the classical mode, I lived in a hotel for a month. I rarely heard or saw any other guests. I felt like the only person in the place: the Days Inn of the Damned. This was a Shining-caliber haunting. I guess it haunts me still.

GN: I’m curious about the eccentric characters here, who all seem right at home, though most of them are transplants in a strange place. How did this setting influence their individual and collaborative existential reckonings?
DN: I’m hardly an expert, but it seems to me that deserts are not an ideal destination if you’re hoping to burnish your social skills. There is a rich history of people who don’t quite fit in staid civil society – they’re too lopsided, too eccentric; maybe, in their own way, even too sane – so they opt to escape rank humanity and they depart for the deep wilderness. But what do they find out there? A lot of sensory overload for one thing. Nature is as oppressive as any city or suburb. The bugs are riotous. Everything sizzles, agitates. The merciless conditions strip you bare. Ultimately, I imagine, what you find is simply more of yourself. (And god forbid you stumble across another fidgety, antisocial exile, too.) What horror. Who could ever come back from that?

GN: The story is also inflected with tender wit. What role does humor play in your work? Can you walk me through how you calibrate comedic moments?
DN: Humor is the only way I can navigate, negotiate, digest, and stomach the world as it is crammed down our gullets every day. And, honestly, it’s a copout, a total dodge. Humor prevents me from accessing the deepest, darkest reserves of human feeling, which apparently scare the shit out of me. So I deflect, I distract. Any comic proclivity I have is just cowardice writ large. But sometimes the cowardice pays off, and I eke out a chuckle or two. Like everything else in writing, the best bits happen quickly, spontaneously – a lightning bolt or flashflood from some dank, troubled skies of the interior – but I have to produce a lot of dreck to get there. The real problem is that the dreck, of which there is much too much, doesn’t always seem so bad at first. It’s kinda clever, kinda funny. It might even be…salvageable. Strained jokes, smug quips, self-satisfied punch lines. I convince myself they have potential, and I spend years wrestling them into shape, sharpening and sandblasting them, rationalizing all my cornball indulgences, until I finally come to my senses and throw them out. A few always linger. I am a slow, belligerent learner.

GN: I love the language and style here. The descriptions lend themselves to sentences with a mirage-like quality—sturdy and infused with sweaty dreaminess (or maybe it’s a nightmare?). Tell me about your process fine-tuning on a language and sentence level.
DN: Too many years of wrestling, shaping, sandblasting, etc. I wrote the first draft of “Pasturelands” in 2014. Maybe once or twice a year, I’d dust it off and fuss with it. Tweak a phrase, prune a paragraph, purge a few pages. The story/setting/characters stayed more or less the same. But as the language grew more precise, so did everything it described. The landscape solidified, the characters shed their glibness. They became more nuanced and reflective, more vibrant. That’s the thing about mirages: They are not muzzy, half-formed visions. Dreamy or nightmarish, they are so vivid they burn their way into your idle brain until you mistake them for reality.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
DN: My weary, half-crazed travel companions for the magical desert mystery tour are Rowland S. Howard, Lee Hazlewood, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Greg Sage, and my wife. (The desert, after all, may be light on people, but not pandering.)