Interview with Jason Mott, Superstar Author of The Returned

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Mott at his book tour stop in Seattle last night at Greenwood Library, sponsored by Elliott Bay. (Cool idea, right – a partnership between a library and bookstore? There should be more of those.) It was a wonderful reading, a great and lively crowd, and a pleasure to see Jason work his magic in person.

Jason is living pretty much every writer’s dream right now. I met Jason through correspondence about comic book poetry some year back, and now he is a New York Times bestselling author (for “The Returned”) with a show coming out on ABC called “The Resurrection” in March 2014. (Oh, and did I mentioned it was optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company?) Jason is a fine poet as well, his Hide Behind Me is one of my favorite superhero poetry books, in case you’re interested. He’s a really nice person, as well, the kind of person you’re really glad good things have happened for. Really. He spent a ton of time answering questions from the audience about how he landed his agent, his editor, how he got his book on television – he was generous and gracious.

Jason Mott, author of The Returned and Hide Behind Me, Q&A

JHG: I’ve heard your work described variously as magical realism, speculative, and genre – how would you classify your book? And, to follow up, who was the greater influence – Stephen King or Haruki Murakami (you can also choose your writer-or-influencer-of-choice here!)

JM:  I think that magical realism best describes my work. But speculative and literary fiction also do a pretty good job of putting a label on it. My greatest writer-of-influence is probably John Gardner. His book Grendel and October Light are two of my biggest influences by far. Grendel was the book that really started me off as a writer, so pretty much everything I’ve done stems from that.

JHG: When we first started corresponding, it was because of our mutual love of comic book poetry. After writing two books of poetry, including the excellent “Hide Behind Me,” how did you approach a book of fiction? Was it a totally different kind of writing experience?

JM: Writing fiction was fairly different, but not as different as people might suppose. I actually started in fiction, so poetry was the divergence that came later in life. But my poetry tends to be fairly narrative driven (thanks to a childhood love of epic poetic classics such as The Odyssey and Beowulf). So, for me, when I shift back to fiction it’s not as far of a shift as one might imagine. And the poetry background helps me conquer some fiction hurdles. If I’ve got a place where I need to have something “big” happen in a small amount of space, the poetic background helps make that happen thanks to the precision of language required in poetry.

JHG: Your book is being turned into a television series called “The Resurrection” for ABC. How did it feel when you watched your work being adapted for the screen?

JM: Both surreal and wonderful at the same time. I never expected it, so it caught me completely off guard when those things began happening. And the production team, the cast, basically everyone involved with creating the show has been simply wonderful. All in all, it’s been terrific and I’m eager to see what they create.

JHG: The subject matter – the return of unexpected people from the dead – is dealt with in your book in a humanistic, heart-felt way. Why did you choose to go with a small town in the South, with a kind of stripped-down approach, rather than the bang and zoom of zombies or something more “sensational?”

JM: This whole project began with a dream I had about my mother. She passed away in 2001 and in 2010, I had a dream that I came home from work and found her at my kitchen table, waiting for me. We sat and talked for hours about everything that had happened in my life since her passing, and it was one of the warmest, most cathartic dreams I’ve ever had. And that was the feeling I wanted to “bottle” with The Returned. I’ve got nothing against the zombie genre—I actually rather enjoy a good zombie movie—but that wasn’t what I was going for. I didn’t want to scare people, I wanted to create a book that spoke about the connections we all make with one another over a lifetime. And, hopefully, readers will feel that I achieved that.