Amy Bernstein is the award-winning author of seven books, including, most recently, Tent City, a family saga about the decline of the American Dream. She spoke to me about speculative fiction and literature as history.
Judith: My guest on BookNotes this month is author, speaker, book coach Amy Bernstein and she’s out with a novel called Tent City. It’s lovely to welcome you back to WBJC.
Amy: Thank you, Judith. I’m happy to be here.
Judith: It’s an interesting title. Give us the premise.
Amy: Tent City is about the decline of the American dream and its impact on one family and one town in particular, and I drew that title from the very image of a tent city or a city of refugees cropping up on our soil in America.
Judith: Would you read an excerpt, please?
Amy: “Terrible clients, the Walters. A realtor’s worst nightmare. Fussy, always changing their minds, and what expectations. Unrealistic even in the best of markets. Irritated, Sylvia turns back again to the yard for solace, a slight catch in her breath. It’s just stress. But reality is once more out of sync. The vast acreage again transformed, a full-on encampment now. Among the tents, fires burn inside metal drums. Laundry dries on strung-up ropes. A soccer ball and a child’s doll lie on the ground just feet from the deck. Sylvia shakes her head briskly before dashing inside to grab car keys, purse, and the extravagantly expensive lavender coat with flower-shaped buttons she bought recently just because it’s spring and because the color contrasts nicely with her thick, brown, shoulder-length curls. Get a grip!"
Judith: Amy Bernstein reading from her book Tent City. I’m going to quote yourself back at you, “Like historians, novelists study trends and events and extrapolate from there to make meaning of human experience.” So how does speculative fiction fit into that idea?
Amy: I think throughout history novelists have paid very close attention to what’s been going on around them in the real world, in historical moments, and have turned to fiction to kind of heighten that reality. So I think many novelists write the first rough draft of history as it unfolds. Even Hemingway was doing that in the, Spanish Civil War, for example. And of course, Orwell was writing speculative fiction with the rise of fascism in, in Europe, and the list goes on and on. And it’s so important for us to write this sort of dark, historically observed fiction in dark times because we’re creating a really important record.
Judith: We do find ourselves now in an historical period that is tricky economically. How do you fit into that in the writing process?
Amy: You know, Tent City, I got the idea probably back in the mid-2010s. Didn’t really write it till around 2019, 2020, and what’s weird is it’s only come out, you know, earlier this year. It’s more relevant now than it was even then because obviously our economy has been in trouble, and people are struggling economically. So it’s deeply, unfortunately, kind of terrifyingly relevant in giving us a shifted version of a reality that feels a little closer than it used to.
Judith: My guest this month, Amy Bernstein, author, speaker, book coach, and her newest book is a novel, Tent City, published by Open Books. And you can find out more on Amy’s website, which is amywrites.live. Thank you so much and well done on bringing this out so contemporaneously.
Amy: Thank you, Judith.
