Alan DeNiro is a bit of a renaissance man, if there were lots of guys in the renaissance who wrote tremendously provocative poetry, short stories, and now-- with Total Oblivion, More or Less (Amazon|Indiebound)--novels. He's also an all-around great guy. I've known Alan and admired his work for years, and was delighted to invite him to drop by during the Winter Blog Blast Tour to talk about his debut novel, which just received a STARRED review from Booklist, and which I absolutely ADORED and can't recommend highly enough. Total Oblivion, More or Less follows 16-year-old Minnesota girl Macy across a post-apocalyptic American landscape overrun by Barbarian hordes, and I guarantee it'll be one of the most memorable novels you encounter this year. If you don't believe me, it comes with recommendations from Dan Chaon, Hannah Tinti, and Karen Joy Fowler.
GB: I'm sure you can guess that the first question I'm going to ask is the process porn question. So, tell me about writing this novel--how was it different/the same as projects you've done previously? How is writing fiction different from writing poetry for you? Did you ever want to stab yourself in the eye, etc.? Were you thinking of certain books that you were in conversation with all along--Huckleberry Finn being the obvious, but are there others? Macy is a very convincing teenage voice; was it hard to nail that or did you just find that you had an inner teenage girl locked up inside?
AD: The process was both the same and very different from other things
that I've written. For one, while writing this I was still learning as
I went with novel-writing to begin with. Once the river established
itself as one of the central anchors of the book, I figured it would
help my sense of narrative to have the book begin at the headwaters
and literally flow all the way down to the Delta. It gave me a
structure that I could always rely on.
I wrote most of this novel in longhand, but a little less than halfway
through I put it away for awhile. I had gotten stuck--looking ahead, I
had no idea how the hell to structure the second half of the novel
yet. I didn't work on it, really, for a year and a half. Then
Hurricane Katrina hit, and with that--and its aftermath--I saw the
novel in a different light. Rather, I knew I had to push the
half-manuscript into our present circumstances, rather than a piece of
speculation. Of course these horrific displacements with refugees take
place all over the world, but the way Katrina's human disaster
impinged on the American experience, and into the common thread of the
nation's discourse...it kicked my ass and pushed me to finish the
novel. The novel became much more political then; I worked in back and
front story of Big Oil's exploits (so to speak) during the crisis. It
became more pointed for me and it became far less of a stretch to
write about Mississippian apocalypse, and also to people's oblivion to
the political conditions that allowed such a disaster to take place in
the first place.
In regards to poetry versus fiction... It took me a long time to
realize it, but it was much, much easier to transition from poetry
writing to short story writing than from short story writing to novel
writing. Even though both forms of the latter are in prose, there was
a much deeper rebuilding process with pacing and voice for me to write
novels. At the same time my fiction has been influencing my poetry of
late as well, as I've been trying my hand at longer, somewhat more
narratively based poems (though I'd hardly consider them highly
plotted epics!). 
With books that influenced the writing of Total Oblivion, a few come
to mind that are maybe a bit more oblique and might not be readily
apparent in the novel (though, maybe so?). One of the big ones was
Herodotus' Histories. The multivariant and ambiguous nature of
history, and how it flows through Herodotus' telling, was a continual
wellspring for the novel. Plus The Histories is dotted with these
bizarre significant details that are full of mystery and speculation.
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler was also a huge influence--naturally,
of course, as being such an outstanding novel that you can just keep
peeling back the layers to. You're not quite sure what's going on throughout. There's an Alice Munro novel I read in college, Lives of
Girls and Women...extraordinary characterization of Dell (the
protagonist) in that book. Finally, one of Paul Auster's less-known
novels, In the Country of Last Things, published right after The New
York Trilogy. It's a very dour yet evocative novel set in this
allegorical city that's experiencing a horrific collapse--that book
had a giant effect on me; I think it's one of Auster's best.
In regards to Macy's voice, I had a decent amount of--well, I guess
you could call it practice, from writing short stories like "The
Caliber" and "If I Leap" that had female teenage protagonists (albeit
3rd person, usually). But for me I think it's a little bit of both
reading other books with strong voices of the opposite gender (i.e.,
Munro) and kind of rolling with the voice of the character on its own
terms. Certainly there is some of "me" in the teenaged angst and
isolation--which I was no stranger to! In the end, it's really her
book--her voice called the shots and I went where she led me.
GB: This is your first published novel (though you also had an awesome
short story collection with Small Beer, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of
the Dead). Was there anything that surprised you during the publishing
process, from submitting to agents to now, on the cusp of the book
coming out?
AD: It was a long road with lots of ups and downs, which I'm sure many
other people have had. It's hard for me to tell whether my experiences
were "typical" or not. What surprised me most was how, when it did
finally come together near the end and I got an agent and then sold
the book, it really was fast. Or somewhat fast--again, it's hard to
tell. But it was a rollercoaster before that (perhaps The Beast, one
of my favorite coasters at Kings Island in Ohio, a fantastically long
and wild ride?). Also, reviews have been somewhat surprising. I was,
and am, fully prepared for some people not liking the book; which
totally doesn't bother me, as long as the book is engaged with on its
own terms. However, some of the reviews have emphasized the fast pace
and gripping read aspects of the book. Well, that's gratifying at
least! I am not usually known as "Mr. Plot." Usually in my stories,
Plot is having a good, serene old time sitting on his living room
floor, putting together a jigsaw puzzle or something, and all the
sudden his friends Weird Shit and Unexplainable Things come bursting
through the door and want to have a dance party RIGHT ON THE JIGSAW
PUZZLE! Anyways, to move away from my metaphor spinning out of
control, it is satisfying to know that the rounds and rounds of edits
polishing and honing the narrative paid off with at least some
readers.
GB: Macy brings two (arguably!) books along on the journey down the
river, The Lord of the Rings and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Two
questions, really: How hard was it to decide which books it'd be right
for her to bring? And what books would you bring?
AD: This was an interesting back and forth for me...in an earlier draft of
the novel, she brought the Gormenghast Trilogy, but I think in a later
draft it was decided in copyedits that perhaps putting in the
doorstopper of the Peake masterpiece was a little bit too clever for
its own good. I think I had her take a different poetry or poetry-type
book as well. And it was super-hard! It's an impossible decision for a
reader like Macy, so I think she was looking for something that could
more universally speak to her condition on the river. Something
canonical. She would be very careful and not bring an "eh" book. For
me, hmm, this is really a variation of the "desert island" question
with an extra kick. Assuming I was fleeing for my life, I would
probably bring: Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, because she was
writing it from her own wartime perspective and it's bizarrely
comforting in an uncomfortable way; Herodotus' Histories, because that
would seriously keep me busy for a while; and The New Penguin Book of
English Verse--speaking of doorstoppers! But it's a great anthology.
GB: This is a post-apocalyptic world that scratches every
post-apocalyptic itch I've developed from reading widely in that
subgenre, but it also feels completely specific and very new. It's
perhaps the first surreal post-apocalyptic meltdown story I've read
where I also really felt the weight and the dread and the oddness of
having everything become incomprehensibly strange. and disintegrate.
Barbarians! How did you approach the worldbuilding? 
AD: I approached the worldbuilding from a very "don't try this at home,
kids!" perspective. Though it would be cool to see or hear of others
who wrote in this way; I'm sure I'm not alone. But essentially I really didn't do any traditional worldbuilding at all. I didn't have a
set world--especially from the beginning--or a set causality. I had
some basics about the invasion, and later in the book--when it took
place in Nueva Roma and "settled down" a bit--I did a little more
thinking through the architecture of the city. And with the bridging
sections that aren't in Macy's voice, there are some snippets of
worldbuilding. But for the most part I deliberately avoided any type
of deliberate compendium of the world. I wanted to funnel the novel
completely through Macy's perspective and her immediate experiences,
so I myself didn't want to know what X really was, or what weird
detail Y really meant. And for the most part, the characters kept
moving down the river and the significant details weren't really
dwelled upon. I did keep a notebook of notes, but they were very
disconnected from any type of interconnected setting. They were more
like "chickens with lettuce for wings" and "giraffes used as calvary."
Images I wanted to throw in. I didn't necessarily know where I wanted
to put them in the novel, but I put a little star next to the ones I
did use. Of course, there WERE points in the book where I used the
bridging chapters to provide commentary on some of the things that
Macy experienced (such as the house/museum in Fortune City).
So, yeah, that was my worldbuilding. I've never been to a lot of the
places set in the novel, especially further down the river, but I
winged it the best I could, mutated the landscape when I had to, and
kept writing. I think it helped create the sense of "haze" in the
novel, the sense of out-of-control-ness that Macy experienced. It
helped as a mimetic experience for getting into her voice. And
incidentally, I wouldn't recommend doing this for every project. There
are novels and stories where it does make sense to nail the minutiae
down. But I think it would be a shame if EVERY novel had to have a
mental, and highly detailed, atlas that went along with it.
GB: And, finally, the easy question--what have you been
reading/watching/listening to that you love lately? Give us some
recommendations.
AD: This is actually hard! Let's see, I just finished Vampire City written
by Paul Feval and translated by Brian Stableford. Written in 1867,
it's absolutely crazy--and actually kind of funny too; felt more like
Lewis Carroll than Bram Stoker at some points. I'm reading a book
called Hotel Crystal by Olivier Rolin--metafictional vignettes about
hotel rooms around the world. Okay, it's much more interesting than
I'm making it sound. I've also been making my way slowly through
Orlando Furioso by Ariosto. A verse translation--a prose translation
of a poem seems to me like a photograph of a sculpture. Anyway, it's a
wild ride. A very very long, wild ride.
In viewing, I've been going through Lost; up to about Season 3.
I've also been playing some really enjoyable games--in the interactive
fiction world, I'm in the middle of this REALLY long work called Blue
Lacuna by Aaron Reed. It's a little twee and "soft focused" but
incredibly well done, and very moving. I'd also highly recommend, on
the completely other end of the spectrum, Dead Space: Extraction on
the Wii. If you can handle space zombie violence and the pressure
cooker of what is essentially a high-end shooting gallery game, it
does some interesting things with POV, narrative control, and pacing.
Finally, back to interactive fiction, I'm dying to play next this game
called The King of Shreds and Patches by Jimmy Maher--Elizabethan
Cthulu with a wicked cool graphical interface. Can't wait. Okay,
that's a preemptive recommendation--hope that's okay?
For music, I've been listening to two back to back Can albums: Tago
Mago and Ege Bamyasi. Superb writing music. I've also gone back and
listened to a lot of my favorite albums from the decade for a top 20
list I compiled.
Visit today's other WBBT stops:
Lisa Schroeder at Writing & Ruminating
Joan Holub at Bildungsroman
Pam Bachorz at MotherReader
Sheba Karim at Finding Wonderland
R.L. LaFevers at HipWriterMama
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