On an ordinary Tuesday morning in the fictional town of ‘Beckitt, Massachusetts’ every cell phone buzzes. There's a terrifying command.
Ballistic missile threat inbound. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.
In Vincent Yu’s debut novel ‘Seek Immediate Shelter,’ those 18 minutes of pure panic strip a community down to its basest instincts ...only for a second text to arrive, declaring it's a false alarm.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: You have put this story centered in a quiet, rural community of Beckitt — this [fictional town] is used among a number of real western Mass. places like the Mohawk Trail and Mount Greylock. Was there a real place that you had in mind when you wrote this?
Vincent Yu, Author: Yes. So, I grew up in Longmeadow, and I have very, very strong connections to the place. Very, very fond memories of growing up there.
Summer arrived in its quavering New England way: a series of false starts and hasty retreats, before a steady quilt of heat finally settled. And with it, the rising chorus of suburban yard maintenance. The droning slap of Weedwackers, the rhythmic fut fut of sprinklers.
"They keep scaring the all the [expletive] birds away," she heard Jorie say to herself.
(from 'Evolution Pressure': Clare Hilldon's chapter)
You've written about an eclectic cast of characters, including many in a fictional Asian American community dealing with the aftershocks of this day. Why did you set these narratives in real and made-up places across WMass?
So, the missile alert that is the instigating event, I took that directly from a real incident that occurred in 2018 in Hawaii. And although I would have loved to have taken an extended period of time, a couple of months, to really explore those gorgeous islands, I felt a lot more comfortable, and a lot more literally and figuratively at home, writing places that I knew.
And I felt that conveying the panic, you know, and then the fallout and then the reconciliations? It all just felt a lot more natural to be writing about home.
Every so often as a reader, you hit a line that completely stops you in your tracks because it's just so gorgeously written and genuine. I have that exact passage. Could you read it aloud and then take us behind the scenes of how you captured that feeling?
Yeah, absolutely.
This [excerpt] is from the third chapter, and it focuses on a character who is an exceptional violinist. When he plays in private, when he plays for himself, he really is able to express himself. But he has some pretty serious anxiety and he can't really fit in into the wider world of his conservatory.
"Most works needed that sort of gropy finessing. Anyway, the composer gave you a block of raw material. It was up to you to shape it. And each draw of his bow across the strings became an act of creation."
How did you come up with "gropy finessing'"?
[laughs] Well, I'm a, you know, I'm a violinist myself. I grew up playing piano and violin. I was very, very heavily involved with the Springfield Symphony Youth Orchestra program. I was in that program from fifth grade until I was a senior in high school.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. I, you know, the Pioneer Valley has just extraordinary musical heritage. And the Springfield Symphony... I would go to their concerts weekly. My private violin teacher was actually a member of the symphony, Marsha Harbison.
I have always wanted to write about the feeling of playing music. It's such a strange kind of contradictory idea because playing music is in and of itself, its own means of ineffable expression. And writing about it seems to be sort of a degree separated.
But I really, I've made it a big project to really try to capture the feeling, what it really means to play and to be moved by your own playing and to convey that through words.
I think that's why it spoke to me so much. I too was a violin player, and as a little kid, I took Suzuki violin with David Tasgal. And then I went on to lessons with the first chair violinist of the Pioneer Valley Symphony, Robin Stone. So, the way you described it just felt so real and brought back so many memories.
I do want to ask you about a little bit later in the book. Here, I don't want to give away too much, so let's just say that… a business manager is telling his staff to "synergize more effectively with the parent company's portfolio." That is beautifully soul crushing!
How much fun did you have with translating ‘we're cutting your budget’ into peak corporate speak? Is that dialog based on your real-life trauma, or did you just channel your inner evil executive?
[laughing] I'm very thankful to say that it was a matter of channeling. I'm thankful to have not had to experience that yet so far in my professional career. You know, that’s a piece with writing.
And what drew me to being a novelist is this idea that you can take all sorts of forms, you can be a real chameleon, you can inhabit different lives, and you can satirize at will.
Thank you. That was a very fun sentence to write, even if it was, um, devastating to the characters.
It absolutely was. We get glimpses of that state official who actually sent the text in your book in a world increasingly reliant on automated systems. Was he a villain in your eyes, or was he just another character trapped in a system that doesn't allow for human error?
Very much the latter. I did a lot of research on the individual, and I was shocked to read about how much vitriol and how much anger was directed at this person. Um. Who did, I mean, he did make a fatal error, but he was a part of a much larger, antiquated, inefficient system.
And that's really what I wanted to convey with the character in the book who does the same thing. It's that he's been taught and he's been almost trained kind of in a laboratory sense, to react to certain cues, to react to certain scripts and to follow a decision tree accordingly.
And so when he receives a slightly different script, he's thrown off. He's very much a victim of the system that didn't really work for him.
Vincent Yu’s debut novel is called ‘Seek Immediate Shelter.’
For full transparency, we should recognize that the musical groups mentioned in passing in this interview, are supporters of NEPM. That, in no way, influenced the course of this conversation.