Gina Nutt: This excerpt is from your second book, Errand Weather, which is comprised of two linked novellas, Fug and The Marine Biologist. What inspired you to begin this project? Can you describe what it was like to fully realize these books in conversation?
Nathan Dragon: It just happened. It felt like it fell into place. I had these two novellas. They were written years apart from each other. But they seemed in conversation with each other. The Marine Biologist came first. 10-11 years ago. I was living in Chicago with my wife before we were married, a couple years into seeing each other. It was the last year we were living there and I really liked the idea of trying to write something in 3rd person that kind of read so close you could almost slip and think it was first person. Or looking at it the other way. Thinking of creating a dissociated first person. I was really into Jean Philippe Toussaint. And I thought Monsieur read that way. Then I don’t know, 5 years go I read The Accident of Art—where Fug’s Epigraph is from: “If we didn’t blink, we wouldn’t be able to see...Interruption is what allows us to take our distance and reclaim our consciousness from the blindness of sight”— and thought about interruption, white space, blinking to see and re-see, impressionism. And ultimately I wanted to write about the love/frustration of life’s small things in a way that felt, to me, very slow. Interruptions help slow things down I think. There’s still, I think/hope, a tension between the two novellas. It seemed like MB was Fug coming into focus.

GN: These vignettes clarify into a collage of MB’s daily life alongside aphoristic reflections. How do you pace narrative progression alongside those quieter, reflective moments? 
ND: I’m not sure. I thought about those reflective moments as MB’s thinking, how he might think in that moment. Free indirect thinking? I don’t know. And I thought how his thinking might be necessary as a counterpart to the more narrative bits. I wanted to write about all those times we talk to ourselves and all those passive thoughts we might have as life happens around them and how sometimes we barely register them.

GN: The characters you bring into relief are intriguing. Tell us how they emerged for you. Did you have a solid sense of place and people when you first began, or did this come into focus as you worked?
ND: If I remember correctly. When I was in Chicago, my last year there, I finally started feeling homesick for Salem, MA & the ocean. The lake (Lake Michigan) is fine but I never felt connected to it. I missed brine. So maybe MB came from that but of homesickness. I wanted to be a Marine Biologist when I was growing up. And Swimmer—just how swimming also touches water but isn’t necessarily a perfect counterpart to the concept of a marine biologist. Jacques is just named after Jacques Cousteau. I don’t know how well that answers the question. And then in Fug, everyone in Fug is some version of someone I’ve crossed paths with. Townies in Salem. Friends. Regulars at places I worked. Regulars at places I was a regular. Other folks that were funny/odd, folks that rubbed me the wrong way. Hopefully a cast of real seeming people.

GN: I’m curious, who was your favorite character to write?
ND: Jacques. I didn’t have a dog yet. When I wrote Jacques. And somehow my dog Vic—I got him a few years after I wrote The Marine Biologist—kind of ended up pretty similar personality-wise. Both, seem to me, are loving and are pains in the neck. There’s a dog in another thing I wrote that has some Jacques-like qualities too.. And this other dog came after I got Vic and so was influenced by Vic. But they all seem alike. Jacques–Vic–dog in other work.

GN: I also admire the poetic atmosphere you curate through lyricism, imagery, and repetitions. How do you approach, dream of, and despair over the sentence?
ND: I keep a notebook of images, phrases, and sentences. I take those. I try to look at what sentences seem to go together. I work them over, work over again and again and again and then I’ve lost my patience. And then I ask my wife Rae if she can read it. And then I ask, Is it done? You think? Really? Then hopefully I remember to say thank you.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
ND: Just read Is Beauty Good? By Rosalind Belben. Reminds me a lot of some of my wife’s writing. It really made me like reading again. I’ve been struggling the last couple months. Have a few good ones to read next that I think should keep the momentum going.

But these have all been important to me at some point in my time trying to write: A Month in the Country, Panama, House of Prayer No 2, Big Bad Love, The Hawk is Dying, Actual Air, Days Between Stations and Zeroville, Deepstep Come Shining, anything Murnane, anything Toussaint, David Berman. Noy Holland’s Bird. Sam Michel’s Strange Cowboy. Magnolia, River of Grass, Stranger than Paradise. Happiness, It’s A Wonderful Life (The movie and the Sparklehorse album). William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Alec Soth. House of Coates. A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go & Soft Water by Robert Olmstead. Greg Mulcahy’s work. Hempel’s. My dog Vic. Vic Chesnutt. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. Country music. Driving. The woods. Fishing. The sun. Henry Fool. I’m going to forget so much here that later I’ll wish I included. Engine House, Salem, MA. My dad grew up working there. I grew up working there. Front Street, Salem, MA—during the first owner’s regime. Getting coffees there before prepping dough and chicken, before delivering, before making fries, subs, wings, dinner, lunch. New Hampshire. Tucson. Virginia. The Pink Pelican in Truth or Consequences. Square Five in Blacksburg. Growing up in Salem.