AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

INTERVIEWER: What’s with the title? The Long Man’s Pillow. What does that refer to?

JULIE: It’s from Cherokee mythology. The Cherokee people described a river that way: as a long, long man with his head in the mountains and his toes in the sea. The story references the Cherokee idea that all waters are interconnected and the value they place on treating the waters with reverence.

INTERVIEWER: Where did the idea for this story come from?

JULIE: Originally, it was a dream. One night, years ago, I dreamed about three wells and a lot of thirsty people. They went from one well to the next. Each time the people went to drink from a well, it dried up. Finally, all three wells had gone dry and the people were looking at me, asking me what to do next.

INTERVIEWER: Were you inspired by any other famous post-apocalyptic stories?

JULIE: I’ve been a fan of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction ever since The Handmaid’s Tale came out in the 1980s. I absolutely love stories like Station Eleven, Bird Box, and A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World. People ask me how I can stand to read such depressing stuff, but I see something noble in these stories.

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for example. The boy keeps asking, “Papa, are we still the good people?” The central question of that novel, as I see it, is, can humans maintain their humanity even in the face of certain destruction? The way the story in The Road plays out answers that in the positive.

But probably the most direct inspiration for The Long Man’s Pillow is a movie called After the Dark. In that, there’s no scenario in which humanity is going to survive the nuclear holocaust, but they still make a choice: instead of throwing away everything that’s decent about themselves as they fight to survive a little longer, they decide to live what time they have left to the fullest. That’s what really got me: what’s the most honorable thing people can do in impossibly horrible scenarios?

INTERVIEWER: What do you want people to take away from reading this novel?

JULIE: I know it reads like eco-fiction, and I do feel that we all need to be mindful of the way we use vital resources like water. But what I really wanted to do was encourage people to imagine themselves in a situation like Vicki’s: what do you do when there’s not enough to go around, and you’re the one who has to decide what happens next? In all good survival stories, whether they’re apocalyptic or not, that life-or-death situation has a way of burning off all the excess gunk and bringing characters face to face with who they really are. I was hoping to write a story that brought people that experience. 

INTERVIEWER: What’s the Alignment System, and how did you use it to create your characters?

JULIE: The Alignment System is a matrix that goes from good to evil on one axis and lawful to chaotic on the other, with nine possible orientations. It reveals the driving forces behind a story’s characters. Storytellers of all kinds use it. In my story, I wanted to include as many different points of view on the situation as I could. In a position like Vicki’s, some people would abandon all the rules and lash out to protect themselves; others might become hypervigilant about following rules, maybe because they think that virtue alone will save them. Still others might use the rules as an excuse to manipulate other people. And then there are those few who will cast aside all the rules and do something extraordinary, even self-sacrificing, for the sake of others. So, in using the Alignment System – with Vicki in the middle neutral spot, since she’s the POV character – specific individuals among the townsfolk represent chaotic good, chaotic neutral, chaotic evil, lawful good, lawful neutral, lawful evil, neutral good, and neutral evil. It’s a nice tool for organizing diverse viewpoints.

INTERVIEWER: So, what comes next after The Long Man’s Pillow? What are you working on currently?

JULIE: Another post-apocalyptic story. This one would focus on a group of neurodivergent people who were totally marginalized in the world before the collapse: absolute misfits. But the new post-civilization world turns out to be a place that needs exactly the kind of people they are. In this new world, neurotypicals end up marginalized and it’s the neurodivergents who go the extra mile to include them.