If you’re going to write a novel in the second person, you need to know what you’re doing. If you’re going to write a novel that involves a school shooting at a university campus in the second person, you absolutely must know what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.
In his debut novel, Bloomland, John Englehardt uses the second person to exceptional effect, leaning into its intimate, confessional nature — the urgent, declarative tone, as well as its unique ability to convey the full scope of the novel. The reader slips from quiet, deeply personal moments in the characters’ lives to the newspaper-headlined trauma of an entire campus reeling in the aftermath of a mass shooting, without the constraint of chronology. Englehardt masterfully writes about violence and trauma, about the lives his characters are able to cobble together and the ones they watch fall apart. Despite the violence and horror ingrained in the narrative, there is a deep humanity and empathy in present in Bloomland. And the book has received praise for it, including a phenomenal examination in the Washington Post.
I caught up with John for a quick skate, followed by a few questions about writing Bloomland, and he did not shy away from the difficult questions that have come with the book’s success. We’ll skip the platitudes about how he can skate as well as he writes, and just say that it’s always good to get a chance to skate outside in Seattle during fall, and that John is just further proof that skaters are, contrary to the stereotypes, quite smart.
Interview and Photos by Lars Garvey Laing-Peterson
I know you didn’t originally set out to do so, but it really feels like Bloomland captures much of the zeitgeist of this day and age—especially for young adults—in its examination of the lead up to and aftermath of a school shooting, a sexual assault on a college campus, depression, trauma, pregnancy.
Originally, I was writing about the promise of higher education, as this place where some students learn to navigate adulthood, and others get left behind. Universities enjoy being seen as these institutions of learning, these transformative spaces, but they also have a lot to answer for. When I was an instructor at a southern university, for example, I was disturbed by the disproportionate amount of social control young men in the Greek system were given, and how much their status depends on their socioeconomic class.
So, yes, I really appreciate this question, because my hope is that the shooting is a prism through which to view various societal issues. A lot of traumatic things happen in this book, and it would be unfortunate to just focus on the shooting. I think I’m surprised I haven’t been asked more often, “Why did you tackle all these various subjects?”
One thing I was trying to do was cast doubt on the idea of the good guy versus the bad guy. Eli doesn’t view himself as a murderer, or even as an entitled or paranoid young man, because for him, those labels are reserved for twisted people on the margins of society. In his head, he’s the nice guy always getting shafted. Similarly, when the novel looks at sexual assault, the perpetrator is so locked within his own pride and comfort, within the definition of himself as a good guy, that he can’t name what he’s doing. He doesn’t view himself as a rapist because rapists are “evil strangers,” not the “normal” guy down the hall. Or, you know, him.
I remember reading Chanel Miller’s victim statement while writing the book. The way she tears apart Brock Turner’s excuses, his claim that it was just a misunderstanding, and all the benefit of doubt he’d been given. His entitlement and lack of remorse was just so eerily similar to that of the young male shooters I was reading about.
I think because of how invested I was in Rose and Eddie, it really didn’t feel like a book only about a school shooting, but really examining these people’s lives, who they had been or tried to be before the shooting, and who they became afterwards.
It’s really about young people trying to construct an identity, about the tools young men and women are and aren’t given. That’s one of the reasons I wanted the shooting to be one thing among many, not the pinnacle event. It needs to be set up against these other scenes in a way that bridges the gap. We need to stop thinking about these instances of violence as separate actions. Male aggression is a systemic issue, and not something we should be compartmentalizing.
You really seem to understand trauma. If this isn’t too personal a question—and please feel free to say if it is—but did you draw from personal experience in order to write about these characters? I know you also did a ton of research for this novel.
There’s a piece of me in every character. Every time I am thinking about something traumatic, I am trying to find something in my life I can start with, so I can attempt to connect and empathize with what my characters are going through. In the end, though, I relied a lot on research.
I read books on loss and grieving, like A Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, On Grief and Grieving by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland, and A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. I remember both Didion and Lewis talk about how grief feels like suspense, which felt so familiar. I remember losing someone, then moving across the country, and still sometimes expecting to come home to my new apartment and see them inside. Their presence was sort of programmed into my world, against all reason. I think that’s how I got to a lot of places in the book. I have my own experience of trauma, and I have my idea of what trauma is, but I need to refract that off of the research.
In the interview you did with Debutiful, you talked about the research really taking a toll on you. You mentioned needing time away from the writing process after watching the testimony of the victims and first responders of the Aurora Shooting, how their words haunted you. Did you ever turn to skateboarding to, like, get out of your head, create a little space between you and the book?
Skateboarding is something I have gotten back into in the last two years. The last year writing the book, honestly, it was something that was great for me to come back to, to have this way to express myself with my body. And there’s the social aspect of it, too, a companionship and excitement outside the realm of academia or the literary world, which can at times be really stuffy.
I’d go down to Cal Anderson or Judkins Park, and I’d have to put my phone and the book away. At this time, I was revising, and waiting to hear back from agents and book contests—and there were definitely days I needed to be away from all that.
Writing can feel so intangible and ethereal, and you go through a lot of self-doubt—saying things like, “This won’t ever be anything.” It has no physical representation in reality, but going to the gym or skateboarding or building a desk… that is tangible. It can be satisfying in ways that writing sometimes isn’t.
I only got back to skating a few years ago, too, after a long time away. Out of curiosity, what made you take a step away in your twenties?
When I got to college in 2005, no one else around me was skating, other aspiring writers weren’t, and part of the identity I had constructed as a skater was within this marauding boys club. I thought: “Am I going to be seen as one of those kids starting fights in the skate videos I used to watch?” And maybe for this reason, being a grown man on a skateboard in 2005 seemed lame and dated and passé. And maybe there were certain parts of the culture that needed to be purged.
Now that I’m 32, I appreciate being able to come back to it and re-negotiate that space. I am a little more comfortable with just embracing that skateboarding is fun, and I don’t have to put a face on it. So, maybe the culture didn’t shift, but my place within the culture did.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about productivity and workaholism. Sometimes I get asked how my day was, and I’m like, “It was a good day, I got this thing done.” With skateboar
ding, it’s not a means to an end, or what you “accomplish.” Getting that trick back, landing that trick, that’s for you.
And I think in our 30s, there’s sort of a dearth of meaningful male companionship compared to what I had in my teens, and that’s what makes it pleasantly nostalgic, that ba
ck then it was me and my guy friends.
Those friends I had, the ones I skated with in my teens—they were my best friends. Growing up in Tacoma, skating, that idea of male companionship, sometimes it feels we’re not supposed to have that now in our 30s. You’re not supposed to be walking around without a purpose, expressing yourself wildly, or sleeping over at each other’s places. You’re meant to be stoic and, like, we can sit and talk about art now, but it has to be in this socially sanctioned way.
Sort of threading together what we’ve been talking about so far, what do you think it would it take to write a skateboarding novel? Like, a good one. Not something draped over the scaffolding of another established subgenre, like a bildungsroman dressed up in baggy jeans.
I think, for me, with a topic like that, I would want a narrow focus. Like with a skateboarding-bildungsroman, I feel like while planning or researching a book like that I would walk away not really knowing what I was trying to say.
But perceptions of private property in America, or the way architecture and urban planning dictates where skateboarding can happen, or the issue of who is given attention in a sport largely determined by style—those are some of the ideas I’d maybe start with.
The private property element… That’s something I struggle a bit with now when watching skate videos and clips. Seeing someone do an amazing backside tailslide, but I’m like, “I think that’s a World War I monument.”
Yeah, or a like a ledge in front of someone’s house. Or the steps of a church. Skateboarding and property damage, it’s complicated. On one side, people are way too territorial, the way we try to own public spaces, say people can’t be there unless they’re quiet or in transit. But there are things like that perfect ledge, but it’s outside this grandma’s cute house. Nowadays, I don’t think I would hit that.
So, I can’t say I’d go about street skating the same way I did when I was younger. Back in Tacoma, there was an attorney’s office at the top of our street, with smooth asphalt, a red painted curb, this perfect manny pad, and a six stair. We’d roll up with kickers and rails and one of those old VHS camcorders, and they would get pretty pissed off with us.
You’ve done several interviews recently and a reading at Elliott Bay Books here in Seattle, with a Q&A after. I consciously tried to stay away from asking too many similar, as I felt you already gave strong answers to questionss like why you used the second person. But what are some questions you wished you had been asked about Bloomland but haven’t been asked yet?
In general, I am starting to wish people would lead with more questions about male socialization, intimacy, and the structural imbalances in higher education, because that’s what I think the book is about. Questions about gun control, policy, and the phenomenon of mass shootings are relevant and important, but I also feel like those questions tend to steer the conversation towards dogma and the sensational headlines, to the places we’re so used to seeing these discussions go.
I wanted to “de-sensationalize” the shooting. That’s the word I kept repeating to myself, because the phenomenon of mass shootings is problematic in itself. It’s sad how concerned we are when gun violence happens in culturally sacralized spaces, like schools, churches, and offices, versus how unconcerned we are with gun violence elsewhere. KUOW did a story where they analyzed youth gun deaths in King County. Almost all of them happened south of the shipping canal, where there’s less social infrastructure, and more racial and economic disparity. 75% of youth gun deaths between 2009 and 2018 were youths of color, and a lot of those were suicides. That’s why we need to stop talking about mass shooters like the way we often do. Or, if we are going to pore over their motives, we need to extend that to everyone. That recent homicide in South Seattle, for example—why aren’t we searching for that person’s manifesto?
A shooting in a lower-income neighborhood, that maybe gets a thirty-second spot on the nightly news. And suicides are rarely talked about.
Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. And there’s all these people out there saying, “I need a gun to protect myself. I need a gun to protect my family.” If you own a gun, you are three times more likely to die by a homicide, and the children in your home are ten times more likely to commit suicide.
It was interesting to see you getting asked about the upcoming [recently released] Joker movie, especially when the film’s been in the news because the filmmakers were being asked about the Aurora shooting, which happened during one of Nolan’s Batman films. Joaquin Phoenix walked out of an interview the other day because of questions about the Aurora shooting. But other than that connection to a mass shooting, it seemed an odd question to ask of you.
It does seem odd, but I don’t mind, because it is actually kind of relevant. Someone I know in the film industry saw the movie and said it took a very different approach to how it handled the motives of a perpetrator. In the movie, apparently the Joker is someone trying to take care of his sick mom, then all this tragic shit happens to him, and he feels his only recourse is violence. But this kind of violence, to me, isn’t interesting. It’s is a complete lack of imagination.
I keep coming back to this one part of bell hooks’ The Will to Change. She’s analyzing men dealing with loss in popular films, and basically says that Good Will Hunting is the only movie she can think of where a disconnected young man actually gets help, goes to counseling, and chooses love—not like American Beauty and many other films, where loss has to end in disconnection, violence, or rage.
So, with the Joker movie, did they not think about this the Aurora shooting, and its lingering trauma, when they were writing the film? The media isn’t responsible for mass shootings, and filmmakers aren’t responsible, but it’s no longer enough to say, “We were just making a movie about the Joker.” You can make art with violence, but you need to have an answer when people ask why you did.
Did you feel prepared to answer questions about why you wrote about a school shooting?
I remember in the middle of writing the book, I was having a drink at a bar and ended up talking to a stranger. It came out that I was a writer, and when he found out that I was writing a book about a mass shooting, he immediately asked if I wrote from the perspective of the shooter. When I said “yes,” he said he couldn’t wait to buy my book so he could burn it. I mean, that’s a really combative hot take, but also I get it. Mass shootings get a lot of perverse attention, and there are a lot of harmful narratives we keep repeating.
Before the Elliott Bay reading, I took three weeks to return to my research, to think about all the questions people might ask me. “Why write a book about a mass shooting?” was definitely at the top. So, in that way, I felt prepared. But writing a book is not about standing by it like some sort of intractable thing. You have to humble yourself before criticism, and take from it what you can. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have blind spots that have yet to be revealed.
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Buy Bloomland not from Amazon (via Dzanc Books).
