Several lifetimes ago, when I was finishing my first novel, Swamplandia!, I had a kind of waking dream, something more vivid and mysterious than an idea—I still have no idea where it came from. A woman was seated in a bare room, holding up a green earhorn, an antique hearing aid. It looked like a primordial seashell. The woman’s eyes were closed, her head tipped forward. A man bent from the waist and whispered into the funnel, pouring some secret inside her.
This woman turned into “The Antidote,” a prairie witch who makes her living taking deposits of settlers’ secrets. She is a kind of living memory bank, a “Vault” for the things her customers cannot stand to know or bear to forget. The book unfolds in the imaginary town of Uz, Nebraska, which takes its name from the Book of Job, during the Dust Bowl drought, and it’s about collapse—and restoration.
This story haunted me for many years before I was able to write it. I’d put it aside and work on other books, but this world and its people never left me. I began it again during the pandemic, when we were locked inside our houses, doubly trapped by the invisible virus and by the wildfire smoke that turned the sun a smoldering red here in Oregon. The imaginary rain that falls across the Great Plains is connected, in ways I don’t claim to fully understand, to the real rain that enveloped Portland after the wildfires of 2020. The braid of hope and horror I felt in 2020 became a tether to this woman in 1935, a childless mother trapped in stasis, grieving the son she still longs to find. And while the novel is set on Pawnee homelands in the state we now call Nebraska, I wrote this book in our house in Southeast Portland, and I could map out where I was walking in Oaks Bottom where certain lines and images came to me. So much of the joy my characters discover together is drawn from experiences I’ve shared here in the Pacific Northwest with other radical dreamers and artists and soil seers and activists and children, a wheeling collective that includes the Doug firs, the ferns, the rains. It’s meaningful to be recognized by the booksellers of the Pacific Northwest, because our green home is where this book came back to life after a long dormancy. And because like every other fiction writer I know, I owe independent booksellers my whole career.
Celebrate with Karen Russell at her award presentation party on March 30, 2026 at 6:00 pm at Literary Arts Bookstore in Portland, OR.
NWbooklovers posts original essays from this year’s award winners as featured posts. You can enjoy essays from past winners of the PNBA Book Award in our archive.
