Jonny Miles:
Johnny. Yeah, nobody calls me Jonathan.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So welcome, welcome, Jonny. Thank you.

Jonny Miles:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
For coming on the show, podcast.

Jonny Miles:
Oh, I’m honored to be here and honored by your words about the book. Thank you.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So let me tell a story about how I came to read it. I have a friend who’s my editor at Oprah Magazine when I was writing there. The editor-in-chief, actually. And she gets special permission to read books before they’re actually released to the public. She has some sort of an app that only editors can get. And she called me and she said, “Oh my God, there’s this book that is not like any book I’ve ever read. You’ve got to read this book.” And she tried to get me to download the program that she was on and I couldn’t do it. So she actually physically gave me her Kindle that had the book on it so that I could read it right away without any delay. So I did. And here it is again. So I was not disappointed. Before I start asking you questions, Jonny, I have to give you my feedback.

My feedback is, first of all, I thought if this doesn’t get a Pulitzer Prize, there is no justice in publishing. There has never been justice in publishing, but I still think it deserves a Pulitzer and any other prizes it can get. Your writing style is like nothing I’ve encountered anywhere. It is so unusual to get a voice that is incredibly fresh, like nothing you’ve read, and yet better than anything you’ve read.

Jonny Miles:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
It’s so succinct. Jonny’s prose is incredibly lean, and it has that delicious quality of feeding you a story that is a whole universe with galaxies and stuff. And it’s all in a simple little line. It’s extraordinary. And also, then there’s the message of the book, which I think is a deep, profound, necessary thing that actually physiologically changed things in me without any effort on my part. I mean, this is truly how I define great literature, and it’s fun to read. It’s not a chore. It’s not Finnigan’s Wake. It’s a little bit like Hemingway, but better, in my opinion. So yeah. So Jonny, I liked your book.

Jonny Miles:
Yes, thank you! I don’t know what to say to all that except thank you. Thank you.

Martha Beck:
You’re welcome. Now, I met you, I think, at a Halloween party in New Jersey. And I knew you as a musician.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
When my editor gave me your book, I thought, Jonathan Miles, Jonathan Miles, could that be the same person? No, he’s a musician. So I don’t know that much about you, despite having met you a couple of times. You seem to be living the life of a naturalist/artist/mystic or something, very much in keeping with the audience of The Gathering Room. So could you just tell us a little about yourself and how you came to be such an extraordinary creator?

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, so I am also a musician and those, I guess we have to track back to childhood when those two things, I almost said braided, but they didn’t really braid for me until later. I started writing early and then switched my energy over to music with adolescence, sort of more natural outlet for a teenager and made my living, or something like a living, as a musician for some time in Mississippi and then returned to writing. And I have been writing novels ever since. And then about three or four years ago, I started playing music professionally again with Jon Batiste and went on his first tour, The Uneasy Tour, as part of the band with him. And it wasn’t until then that I understood the connection between those two endeavors, those two enterprises. I always thought of them as existing in separate containers inside myself. There was the writing and there was the music, and maybe they were distantly related like cousins by the fact that they’re both creative enterprises, but I didn’t see any connection to them. And it’s not until recently that I’ve made that connection that they’re both manifestations of the very same impulse, which is—

Martha Beck:
Yes? What’s that?

Jonny Miles:
Well, I think that storytelling and music emerged from the very same place around the very same time, that place being a campfire, thousands and thousands of years ago when people realized and began using rhythm and narrative and melody in order to find some sort of spiritual order from the chaos of survival to find a way to metabolize everything that had happened to them and everything they’d felt. And so with that in mind, I think that whether you’re making music or whether you’re writing novels, your objective is the same. It’s to make people feel, to move them, to make them think, to make them remember, to make them wonder, and maybe to make them dance, but ultimately, most of all, to make them feel, to nudge them, maybe even just slightly in a different direction towards some kind of fresh intensity is what you hope for. So I think they are related. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s a really, really beautiful analysis. And I love the image of the campfire because you’re also very much a naturalist, right? I know you through our mutual friend, Liz Gilbert, mostly, and she’s described your family to me as living in a very sort of authentic way.

Jonny Miles:
I think the word I’ve heard her use on occasion is the word “feral,” but yeah.

Martha Beck:
It’s okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve met your kids, they’re amazing. Your wife, the whole family is amazing. Now, exactly—so are you off the grid or… Well, obviously we’re Zooming, so you’re not completely off the grid.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, no. This is proof. This is proof I’m on the grid. I did live off the grid.

Martha Beck:
Did you?

Jonny Miles:
Many years ago in a 12 by 30 cabin in the woods in Mississippi for years. No phone. I did have electricity.

Martha Beck:
How many years?

Jonny Miles:
Oh, gosh, seven.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Jonny Miles:
It was blissful, but it’s very difficult to do nowadays.

Martha Beck:
Now were you raising a family then? Or were you by yourself?

Jonny Miles:
No, no, no, no, no. I was by myself then. So no, but now we live in rural New Jersey, top of a hill. We have a little, I wouldn’t call it a farm, maybe a farmette, farmellini, small farm. We raise chickens and ducks and vegetables and try to spend as much time as possible outside.

Martha Beck:
Okay. So you are— Yeah?

Jonny Miles:
I think I’ve always been drawn to natural spaces because they make sense to me in a way that human spaces don’t always. And I’ve tried to raise my kids to have that same sense.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And your children are also brilliantly talented and fabulous in every way. I’m going to go from the sublime to the ridiculous for just a second because they call me a life coach and I train life coaches, but that is actually not what we’re doing at all. What I’m actually doing is trying to live my own nature, which happens to follow the archetype that might be a medicine person in a traditional society. And at a certain point in my own life of researching and writing, I became very focused on this after an encounter with a shaman in Africa where I was told, “Go, go.” I dreamed about the ancestors. And then I told my friends there in the Shangaan tribe about it, and they rushed to get a shaman because you have to have a shaman if you’ve had that dream.

Anyway, she said, “Go find the people who would be the medicine people, the Sangoma, the shamans of other cultures.” And after a few years of research, I realized that there is a personality cluster in certain individuals that are not usually clumped by our culture. So the storytellers, the dancers, the musicians, the naturalists, the healers, the psychologists, the mystics, they’re basically the medicine people, and they existed in every pre-modern human civilization. So this cluster of characteristics, I believe is genetic and that some people just have it. So as you’re describing your entire life, going out to the woods for seven years, getting off the grid, writing music, campfires, it’s like right exactly down the center of the lane for this archetype. And I want to talk a little bit more about, well, a lot more about this, but this book, it’s about Earth and what we have done to the earth and what we might still do to the earth. My personal woo-woo belief is that those of us who fit the archetype of the healer are drawn to healing the planet itself right now because the ecosystems on which we depend have been so despoiled.

And this book is about an ecosystem that has been despoiled by human interference. And the main character… It’s so brilliant. The main character is given an assignment that he believes is a conservationist assignment to go heal an ecosystem, and he goes to try to do it. And lo and behold, it turns out that the human calculations about how an ecosystem can be refurbished aren’t exactly correct. And I don’t want to give too much away, but he undergoes this shift of perspective and paradigm that is, as I said, it really shifted me because I’ve been obsessed with this stuff since I was born, right? I mean, literally since I can remember. And this book is about a deep investigation of these attempts to … All the talk there is about conservation, restoration, healing the planet. It’s a little darker and yet a little brighter, I think, than most analyses of it. And it’s not an analysis, it’s a fabulous story, and it has that rhythm and that energy that gets you moving. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with this idea? What motivated you to write it? What gave you all the ideas? The whole character’s backstory comes out in this incredible economical way. Yes, tell us everything, please, about how this fits in.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. I mean, first I just want to say I love the framework that you just laid out about healing, that Adi, this is the main character, believes he’s been sent as a kind of healer to this island. But what he finds is as we humans, what we are healing or trying to heal are wounds that we inflicted ourself. It’s the arsonist showing up with the bucket of water. The story itself, the idea of it, the seeds of that go back 25 years to when I was… I’ve also been a journalist and I was down in the Galapagos Islands, embedded with the Ecuadorian Navy who were patrolling against illegal shark poachers. And while I was there, I happened to hear about government efforts to eradicate feral goats on some of the islands of the Galapagos, because the goats had been left there by whalers hundreds of years ago. And yeah, there’s one and stashed there as protein. But of course, the whalers went away, but the goats didn’t, and they did as goats continued to do. But what happened is they had decimated the habitat for native tortoises. So the government’s plan was to send in men with rifles to shoot and kill every last goat.

And I found myself immediately seized by the moral friction of that, this ostensibly noble and righteous ecological aim chafing against the wholesale slaughter of species. And I just wondered, and I guess that’s the novelist in me, right? That’s sort of the abstract thing. You just wonder how that feels for a human being. And in this case, how would that feel for a human being who has been given a rifle and told to do that? What would that sound like? What would that feel like? But the idea, as they sometimes do, just marinated for 25 or 20-some years until it finally came back. Sometimes it takes that long.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, it was a very, very fruitful gestation then. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the title of this book. It’s called Eradication: A Fable. Yes, I did. I said it once before, but I’m going to say it many times. Eradication: a very loaded word. And I mean, the irony is immediately apparent as you start the book that the problem is we’ve killed so much, and the solution is let’s kill a lot more.

Jonny Miles:
Exactly.

Martha Beck:
And it makes sense to the character kind of. Then he gets to the island and he’s by himself. I just saw something, a documentary where there was a cult and they arrested some of the cult members and they were always together and some of them were children and they separated them and sent them to different foster homes. And I thought, “Oh, how cruel.” And then they interviewed some of them and they said, “Yeah, until we were separated from each other, until we were alone, we didn’t start thinking.” It was like there was a hypnosis in the cult. And I was watching that thinking there’s a hypnosis in the cult of our entire vast global society that is saying, “Well, we’ve killed a lot. Let’s kill some more.” Like the movie, The Matrix, where he finds out he could literally do anything with his imagination. And his imagination coughs up the phrase, “We’re going to need a lot more guns.” Really? That’s the best you can do?

So you kind of show how that falls short. Again, people are always telling me I give spoilers. It falls short for him morally and emotionally, psychologically, and then he has other experiences that sort of open his eyes. Did that experience of living by yourself in the forest for seven years, was it anything like this kind of gradual awakening that Adi has in Eradication?

Jonny Miles:
It must have been. What you’re describing is that sense of the way we human beings think. It’s almost like we’re, to use a metaphor from nature, we’re in the current of a river and we’re just impelled into that main stream of thought. And it’s only sometimes, if you find your own pool, your own puddle, that you can actually pause and look at that current, wonder where that current is going and if you want to go with it. Solitude, it’s necessary for me as a writer, of course, but I think it’s necessary for me as a human being because solitude is where focus happens, and it’s where ideas fall apart in very beneficial ways, received ideas. Because when we’re around other people, the ideas, the notions, we tend to take them for granted, they’re just part of the atmosphere. They’re in the molecules. But when you’re by yourself, you can actually break them down, understand them better.

And one of the things that dismays me about just contemporary life, not to sound too ancient here, but that alone time is now so deeply rare and that these devices, even the old boredom of waiting in a line where your thoughts can unspool, where you’re forced to just think. We’ve lost these very precious moments and in those moments, I think are when we are at our most selves, I’m phrasing that clumsily, but most ourselves.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yes. I love that you just said everybody has to be in their own pool because the author photo on the back, you’re underwater, which is lovely. And then this image of ideas falling apart rather than coming together, this was so beautifully evoked in this book. And it rang so true to me because I also ran to the forest for six years on my 50th birthday. I just went out to live as far from people as I could. I had a small family, but I was out there for six years not doing much except meditating in the woods. And that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t have any new ideas. I didn’t have any bolt from the blue. I felt strongly compelled to go by myself and meditate. So just stop thinking. And what happens is not a consolidation of ideas, but a dissolution.

Jonny Miles:
Exactly.

Martha Beck:
And you said “ourself” and at that moment you said, “I don’t like the phrasing,” but there’s not a good phrase for the no-thingness that remains conscious and aware after the ideas dissolve.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And in Eradication, you depict that. I’ve read so many things, Buddhist tracts and Christian mystics and whatever, I’ve read a lot about that process of the dissolving of ideas, but Eradication shows it happening and allows the reader to go with it in such a deft and masterful way that you can actually feel your own received ideas starting to fall apart with the characters. I don’t know how you did that. How long did this take to write? It’s short, but it takes a long time to write a short book.

Jonny Miles:
It does. Yeah. I mean, I could say it took me 25 years from the idea to the completion. I’m being glib with that. The actual writing probably took a year and a half, which—it is hard to write that lean. I think you used that word earlier.

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh. It’s so economical.

Jonny Miles:
Well, yeah. And the problem with economy is that there’s just no superfluousness that you can, you know, you have to keep it tight. You have to keep it controlled.

Martha Beck:
It’s amazing.

Jonny Miles:
To the point of the size of the book, I wanted to write a short novel because I find myself attracted more and more to short novels. And I do think it’s partly… I think you’re asking a lot of contemporary readers nowadays to put a cinder-block-sized novel in their hands. And I say this as someone who’s written a cinder-block-sized novel, but by the time, let’s say you read at night and you put your bookmark in at page 130, and then by the time you pick it up the next night, you have been bombarded by just untold terabytes of information. And I think it is asking a lot of a reader to, okay, reorient myself, find myself again, get back into the story, while life is still tapping us on the shoulder at every minute. So what I wanted to do was write something that can conceivably be read in a single sitting.

Martha Beck:
Which is how I read it, yes, for the first time.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, that makes me happy. Yeah. Every cook likes to hear there were no leftovers. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. I know there are a lot of people who watch this who love writing and love to write. And I have to say that it’s incredibly hard. It’s true when I set out to write these days, I always remember how easy it is to put down a book and how much that… I think maybe the culture is just keeping all our received ideas alive and amplifying them continuously. So that spareness, that openness is almost impossible to find. But also if you’re going to get people to read a book at all, however short, it has to be so grabby. So those of you out there who write, I mean, this book is a study in how to grab a reader’s attention. And ironically, he’s supposed to shoot everything because it goes like a bullet, the narrative does. And there are so many things that delight and cause questions and mystery. You don’t really know what’s happened to this guy. You know that big things have happened to him, but you don’t know it right away. The questions are seeded in so early and so well that you’re dying to read on. And then there’s so much quirkiness and humor. When he gets to the island and the other characters, the first ones you meet, aside from the woman who sends him out, are the goats. And when my friend gave me the book, she was laughing out loud. She said, “These goats, you are going to fall in love with these goats. They’re amazing. They’re different characters.” And I read it. I did laugh out loud at a lot of the goat interactions. Have you had a lot of goats?

Jonny Miles:
No.

Martha Beck:
How did you…?

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. It’s funny because my wife has been lobbying for us to raise goats for years and I’ve always resisted because they can be a bit of a chore, let’s say.

Martha Beck:
As you see in the book, you don’t whitewash that.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. Yeah. So no, I don’t have a terrible amount of experience with goats. So I relied on two friends of mine who both made slightly unusual midlife changes and decided to become goat herders. And so I spent a lot of text and phone calls asking them about goat behavior. So yeah.

Martha Beck:
Well, they told you well. I know nothing about goats, but I loved those goats. So back to solemn topics, the book goes to a place, as I said, I used to be very rah-rah, as a tiny kid, I was a rah-rah conservationist, like panicking over the disappearance of the rainforests and stuff by the age of three, and really was a true believer up through my 20s, 30s, and 40s. In my 50s when I went to the woods, I had sort of given up on the idea that we could roll it back. And I just read something online, of course, because that’s where we read things these days, with an ecologist saying, “None of us alive are going to see the temperatures go down. We’re never going to see a cooler summer,” which I think, I mean, there is fluctuation. And he said, “We’re never going to see the restoration of anything and maybe our children will never see it, even if we take every measure.” So that was very despairing.

I don’t quite land there, but I was wondering, because the book leaves the question open, which it is, right, you don’t know for sure. But how do you feel and what gives you the courage to plant your feet in the topic of the destruction of the ecosystems and write a story that has at least some hope in it? Where are you with that whole nightmare we’re living through?

Jonny Miles:
Oh, gosh. I mean, I think the best summation of that is a line from the poet, Pablo Naruda, who says, “I know the earth and I am sad.” There it is. One of the things that I wrestled with in the novel, and there’s two characters that you mentioned, one of them says, “Nature doesn’t give a … ”

Martha Beck:
You can say all the words.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. It’s the fact that Nature itself is a human construct.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Jonny Miles:
Nature doesn’t know its nature. Nature is an idea that we invented to apply to something that we see as separate from us. There’s the human world and the natural world. You find that framework so often. And of course that’s a false distinction. We are all living in nature, in the natural world.

Martha Beck:
Always. All the time.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. Yes. And we are always changing it by a presence. We are always altering it and we’re not going to stop. What I think the best we can hope for is to reduce our altering, is to preserve some areas, not as museum pieces, but simply for what we call nature itself, for the planet itself, for the other species that we share this giant sphere with. But it is difficult and despairing to think that even in my lifetime, and I’m not that old, that so, so much has been lost and is still being steadily, steadily lost every day. The problem is then how do you wake up every day? How do you look outside? What do you find? How do you go on? The one consolation for me is that nature is going to win this fight.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Done deal.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The ending has been written. Nature is going to outlast us. So the metaphor of the dandelion coming through between the cracks on a city sidewalk. Nature’s going to win. So very often when we’re talking about the planet, we’re talking about our experience with it.

Martha Beck:
Sure.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah. Again, our construct of it.

Martha Beck:
And yes, for sure nature’s going to win. So that is pretty dejecting. Given that, and you have children, yeah, do you hope they have children?

Jonny Miles:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I have children. There is a kind of, I have to say, as I get older, there’s this kind of relief. And the younger people listening to this, this is just my own diabolical self-centeredness. It’s like, “Good luck, kids. I’m out.” There’s kind of this feeling of, “Ooh, nature’s going to beat me faster than it beats anything else.” So there’s a kind of existential resignation that I’ve reached, but I also have the unknown. And that is one thing I did encounter during all that meditation that I have no idea what’s going to happen, how fast anything could happen. There are left turns that have happened in our lifetime that were so unforeseen. I mean, I grew up thinking, everybody thought we were going to be living on the moon and we would all have spaceships and weightless coffee or whatever. Nobody foresaw the internet that I knew of. Nobody saw the type of society we’re living in now. So there’s a piece of me that stays open, and I have to say, and it may just be a weed of hope that will not quite die. So I don’t quite despair, but I don’t think that anything in our known liturgy of things is going to fix what we call nature. Where do you land in the meaning of life, the meaning of human life, like the deeper existential questions in the book and in yourself?

Jonny Miles:
So I think this is why I write fiction. It’s certainly why I read fiction to dig as best I can into that very question. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten answers, but I’ve found that it’s the questioning that is more important than the answering for me. When it comes to writing novels, they always start with a question, this one or multiple questions. This one probably was, “When is killing righteous and who gets to decide?” The great painter, Terry Allen, who once said, “The shortest distance between two questions is art.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, beautiful. Wow.

Jonny Miles:
A great line. But when I’m writing, I have these questions, but my goal isn’t to answer them because if I wanted to do that, I could write an essay. I think to write a novel, you’re taking these questions and you’re deepening them, you’re broadening them, you’re multiplying them, you are giving them a voice and a face, but ultimately the story is the answer.

Martha Beck:
So did you know… Sorry, go ahead.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, no, no, go ahead.

Martha Beck:
Did you know the end of the novel? Did you know… It doesn’t exactly answer any questions, but it definitely goes to a place of very satisfying sort of consolidation of the things that have happened in the book and of the character’s inner life. I found the ending, it’s so incredibly hard to write beginnings and endings, even harder, I think, to write endings than beginnings. And to make it so satisfying and so brief, the last page was just like, wow, wow. Did you know where it would land when you started?

Jonny Miles:
I did. It was the one thing I know, and I always know my endings before I begin. I always know the actual plot.

Martha Beck:
How do you do that?

Jonny Miles:
The last line.

Martha Beck:
Come on, procedurally.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, it’s a bit strange. I’ve heard it likened to throwing a pebble into a pond. And so the writing process, you’re just swimming around trying to find that pebble, the pebble being the ending.

Martha Beck:
I love that.

Jonny Miles:
But it’s simply the way that I have found that I need. I need the destination. How I get there, I don’t know. But what I wanted out of that ending, to go back to what we were talking about with questions, is for that ending to just detonate a hundred more questions. And to sort of what I hope happens is that when the reader comes to that ending, yeah, I mean, they are bombarded with questions of their own.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I love it. It’s funny because The Overstory is one of the longest books I’ve read recently, longest novels, and it had that same last page “pow” that this book does. But he has like 93 characters and basically six novellas. And you managed to make this one character, Adi, sort of represent, embody all the scarring, the pain, the questions, the hope, the love in his sort of battered psyche when he goes into the story. And it’s very obvious, or I don’t know if you meant it this way, but it seems very obvious that his internal life is a reflection of what’s happened to the ecosystem and to the earth in general. And he does have… I think it’s very redemptive for him in a way. I guess you could say it’s not, but he changes in a way that to me felt very satisfying and, to use that word again, healing. I don’t know if that was your intention, if you got there accidentally. Did it reflect anything that you’ve experienced? And does that arc from really, really obliterating pain to healing and peace? It may not be rejoicing, but it’s peace. Do you find that in the circumstances we see here, all of us listening to this, can you show us a way to a kind of healing, even if we don’t know the answers to the questions?

Jonny Miles:
I don’t know. Possibly. And I say, not this book, but storytellers in general can sometimes give you a kind of rough map. It’s strange the way fiction writing sometimes manifests because Adi’s grief, which you’re alluding to, because he has suffered a tremendous tragedy in his life, was almost an engineering way I had to get him to the island. And that’s a very radical move to give up your life in the city and go to a remote island when you have never really been out of the capital of the country, never been out of the main city in your life. And so it started as just a kind of architectural or engineering thing, but then of course, in the magical way of writing fiction, it deepened and I can’t imagine it any other way. And yeah, it became a mirror Adi’s own grief, his own passage and his own way of trying what Tennessee Williams called “running toward the light.” It became a kind of mirror to the islands, its own grief, its own ravagedness.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yes. It’s so beautifully interwoven and that is a real tribute to your craft and to your mastery of the writing craft. I’m also wondering, as you’re talking about your friend and mine, Liz Gilbert’s theory in Big Magic, her book on creativity, she states the belief, I haven’t talked to her to ask her if she still holds this recently, but that a story will go looking for an author, and a song will go looking for a songwriter. I know you write songs as well, right? You do.

Jonny Miles:
I don’t write songs. I’m an instrumentalist.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, I know.

Martha Beck:
Your daughter writes awesome songs.

Jonny Miles:
She writes songs, yeah, but she did not get that skill from me.

Martha Beck:
Wow. Oh, good. There’s one or two things you still haven’t done. But Liz says, there’s this famous example where she’s writing a book with a very detailed plot. She puts it aside. Then she goes to have lunch with Ann Patchett. And Ann Patchett is writing a book with exactly the plot and it’s very involved. And these two things do not seem to be coincidental. They’re too close to be statistically random. When you say it was a feat of engineering to get Adi off the mainland into the island, it almost felt to me like there was a teleological aspect to the story itself. Like your muse was whispering in your ear, “Put a big tragedy in there. It’ll get him to the island.” And then it turned out to be this incredible illustration and harmony with the other themes in the book. Do you ever feel what Liz says, that the daemon in the wall is coming into your mind and saying, “Hey, try this.”

Jonny Miles:
Absolutely. No, absolutely. She’s right. Yeah. I’m also reminded, I can’t remember if it was Michael Jackson or Prince in the story, but one of them called their band, we’ll say it’s Prince, and I’m not sure I’m getting that right, called the band at three in the morning and said, “Everybody needs to come to the studio right away.” And so everybody gets up, goes to the studio and had to record a song. And the reason for it was, “If I don’t get this down now, God’s going to give it to Michael Jackson.”

Martha Beck:
That’s great.

Jonny Miles:
Which illustrates that yes, we are always… And Liz’s point, we’re on the receiving end of these ideas. And I tell my students—I teach writing—you know when you have a viable idea, when it won’t leave you alone. And when it comes to you unbidden, when it’s something that comes into your head as you’re drifting off to sleep or when you’re driving, those are the ideas that are alive. Those are the ones that are electric, and those are often the ones that you don’t understand.

Martha Beck:
And what gives you the courage to say, “Okay, this idea keeps coming up. I know the pebble. I’ve got the final sentence. Other than that, I just have to jump into the water.” Did you write this book on proposal? Were you paid for it ahead of time? Did you have to sell it once it was finished?

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, after finish. And because I abandoned six novels between my third novel and this one. One of them, I was about 200 pages in. So in some sense, this was almost, in my head, this sort of last chance. And I knew this idea was deeply weird, but it wasn’t letting me go. And I thought, well, let’s try this. And no, I didn’t try to, as is very common in publishing to sell it what they say is “on a partial,” you know, out of a few chapters. I knew that I needed to finish it to see if I could even do it. And that’s what I’m talking about with these ideas that frighten you because you’re not sure, A, if there’s value in this idea or that you can pull it off, but those are the ones, the ones that frighten you. Those are the ones that are most alive. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Love that. So I think the sort of materialist culture has it completely backwards because the idea is, “Well, I’m a good writer. I therefore can make money doing it” or “I have a good idea. I know there’s money in this.” It always comes down to money or maybe fame, status as well. But people are always asking me, “If I’m sure I’ll succeed, if I’m sure I can make money, I will sit down and write every day. But writing a book is just too large a proposition to take with an uncertain outcome.” And they don’t say it in a greedy way. They just are afraid. They’re afraid to take that amount of time and devote it to something that they can’t hold up to the world as a moneymaking project. You’ve lived off the grid, clearly you don’t think about exchange and money quite the way most people do in the culture. How do you say to your family and friends, “I’m going to shut the door and write, and I have no idea if it’ll make any money and it’s a weird idea. I’m just going to see.” How do you justify that with the people around you?

Jonny Miles:
Oh, what a great question. So I will say I’m very fortunate to be married to a wonderful woman who has always, who knew from the beginning that she was marrying an echoist. And even at best, a creative person’s income is never steady. I mean, if you sell a book every five years or so, you get a paycheck every five years or so. So as far as justifying it, it’s almost impossible to justify art, making art. But also because just to the scenario that you described, yes, you’re working on something strange and mysterious to you, even if you know how it’s going to end, you don’t know how you’re going to get there. And if you start thinking about the marketplace or money or any of that, that can be crippling. So I guess my answer to your question is, how do I justify it is by ignoring it, by not justifying it. And for all these years, I’ve always had to find some other income stream, whether that means playing music or doing journalism or whatever it is, but it is always to support the making of the art, to always provide the cushion for that, and of course to keep the lights on and that sort of thing, and my children fed. But I think an artist makes art regardless. It’s the making that is the beautiful part. I actually don’t, I don’t like the publishing part. I really, in a perfect alternate universe, I would write these books and give them to a few people and then be done with it and then start writing another one.

Martha Beck:
That was my plan too. It didn’t work.

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, I know, it’s a bad economic model. But it’s really the old saw about “the destination is the journey” kind of thing. It is the making of it that is the satisfying part. And then, well, two satisfying parts: the making of it and then seeing your story affect other people and to hear their take because another thing I’ve learned is that the story that I write is not the story that you receive.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Jonny Miles:
That was frustrating when I was younger because I didn’t understand it. And now I think it is absolutely beautiful and magical that nobody has read the same book.

Martha Beck:
Yeah! Once you’ve got a book in your hands, it’s yours. It’s yours. You know, bounce off what I wrote, but you are writing that book now. Postmodernism, yay!

Jonny Miles:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So I love that. And I also think it almost comes full circle back to that shaman in Africa. It was a very weird experience. There was a flickering fire and it was a cold night and there were lions roaring close by. And this little tiny woman from Mozambique, this old lady was huddled on this mat throwing the bones for me. She had a little pouch of bones and chicken feet and whatever. I don’t know, but it’s a form of divination. They throw them on the mat and then she would read the patterns. And she would look up from the bones and she only… I don’t know what she spoke, but she didn’t speak English. There was somebody interpreting. But when she looked at me, I was trying to be all very anthropological: “Ooh, I’m going to participant observe this.” But when she looked at me, it felt as though two very intense icy needles were going in, all the way up and down like a machine. I felt like I was in some sort of MRI. It was very physical. It scared me to death because I really hadn’t expected it. But she was saying, “You have to go tell people. You have to go tell people what’s being forgotten. You have to go tell people what’s been lost.” And so I went back and tried to write about shamanism and that got me to the whole idea of a global healing that’s trying to happen. And it took me to some very weird and mystical places where the questions cracked wide open and I don’t have any answers yet, not at all. But it almost feels like this book, I mean, if something grabs me this hard—Eradication: A Fable. Read it, by Jonathan Miles. Buy it, read it, buy it for your friends, tell them to read it.

When you say that it picked you up and carried you like a river, that experience for me was like being picked up and thrown forward into rapids to take all the crap that I was going to get from intellectuals about even addressing this topic. But I have to say there’s a vein of the mystery in this book that it catches you like a fish hook and drags you along, very much the way I felt that old woman’s presence dragging me into something that I didn’t understand. You’ve lived this long life of art and pondering and like deep thought, deep solitude, communion with ecosystems. Do you feel that fish hook in you? Do you feel that the river is still flowing for you? Because looking at it on the surface, what we call nature is pretty much doomed. Let’s get some sanctuaries and keep it alive for the kids. But is there something you don’t yet understand that is going to pull you into writing more books and making more music?

Jonny Miles:
Absolutely. Because I feel that I know 2%, at best, of what is knowable about this mystery of life that we’re living. I mean, the physical life, the spiritual life, just existence. Writing for me is a way of delving into that mystery. And again, not to solve it, but brushing myself up against these mysteries. It’s how these novels start from questions, they start from mysteries, and each one is very different. And each one just represents, for me, a mystery that wouldn’t let me go each time. And now I’m 250 pages into a new one. It’s completely different, but it’s still, there’s just another mystery that I need to get my head around, so to speak.

Martha Beck:
Can you give us a little taste? What’s the topic?

Jonny Miles:
Yeah, I find that for me, writing novels is how I interact with life. I don’t want to say too much of it now because I almost don’t want to jinx it, but it’s decades’ worth of letters back and forth between two people.

Martha Beck:
I love it.

Jonny Miles:
Both of them trying to figure out life and its attendant mysteries.

Martha Beck:
Oh, it sounds absolutely delightful. And anything that comes from your pen or your word processor or your mind, I have to go—I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read your backlist yet, but I’m going to go and read everything you’ve ever written and everything you ever write from now on till the end of my days. So those of you out there watching The Gathering Room, whom I know identify with these same themes of mystery and the healing of the planet and the love of art, you are in for an absolutely once-in-a-lifetime treat with Eradication: A Fable by Jonathan Miles. Thank you so much for being here, for living the life you’ve lived and for writing this delicious book.

Jonny Miles:
Martha, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for the conversation. It’s been a pleasure.

Martha Beck:
The pleasure is all mine. So yes, let’s get this out there just for the fun of it.

Jonny Miles:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
All right. Take care. Thanks again.

Jonny Miles:
All right. Thank you so much.