Interview with Cody T. Luff – Author of RATION

Last week I posted my review of Cody T. Luff’s debut novel, Ration, out now from Apex Books, and I couldn’t be happier to welcome him to the blog today to answer some questions. Welcome, Cody!

Congrats on the publication of your first novel, Cody! Please tell us a little about the process involved in finding a publisher and working with Apex Books.

I am a lucky writer in the fact that I have an amazing agent. Beth Marshea is both profoundly supportive and remarkably capable of translating my creative confusion into more than just an inkling in the back rooms of my mind. Beth has been a tectonic force in my writing, pushing me to write the story I loved no matter how much shadow seeped into the pages. Beth’s courage and her ability to offer a never-ending tsunami of energy and support are why Ration was able to take the shape it has. She fell as in love with my story as I did and found a publisher that was equally enthralled by dark worlds and scary stories.

When Apex expressed interest in Ration I was blow away. This is a publisher that has published numerous award winning novels and is both fearless and joyful in their catalogue. Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner worked with me to explore my world a little more, to ask hard editorial questions that sent me back to my keyboard to file down the edges of this story that had been haunting me for such a long time. It was fascinating to read Lesley’s comments and to see what she saw in my work, to tighten sentences and to nail down a few strange threads that had gone rogue during drafting. The people at Apex love the stories they choose. They are people of words and metaphors, of extremely sharp observational skills, and some incredible stamina and strength.

Ration is a dark, post-apocalyptic horror novel that imagines a future where food as we know it is almost non-existent. How did this idea evolve?

I teach reading and writing at my local community college. My lectures tend to be a little odd and more than a little kinetic. A few years ago I began a lecture by asking the question, “What are you worth?” This was relevant to our reading materials but the class was already primed and ready to tear into such a undefended and ridiculous question. The answers I received varied between bank account balances to recitations of the value of love. One student startled me by asking how much their kidney was worth. This caused the class to whip out a sea of glowing smartphones and begin googling madly. The conversation was wild and vivid, exactly what I want in my classroom but it was also haunting. By the time I made it home that evening I was already lost in the idea that every piece of my body had a dollar value. That it could be parceled out piece by piece. The idea of my esophagus with a price tag on it lodged in my mind for days.

A few weeks later I ran across an old friend. We were both born in Montana and grew up in rural environments. We discussed a great many things, during a slow point in our conversation I shared my classroom discussion with her. She was quiet for a time before mentioning that she sold plasma in college to make ends meet and that her own food insecurity had forced her to count calories in an uncomfortable reversal of a typical diet. She told me about stealing vitamin C tablets from Safeway to ensure she didn’t end up with scurvy because she was eating only noodles for a year.  There were many other seeds, some societal, some personal that helped Ration evolve but I think these two moments, moments that have stuck with me for a very long time, are at the heart of it.

Ration is following on the heels of lots of dystopian novels, but you’ve put a unique spin on the subgenre by eliminating men from your world. What were your influences, and what made you choose to focus on the lack of food in the future?

I have been teaching in some capacity for fifteen years. Sometimes in the classroom and sometimes outside of it. So many things change depending on location and the confluence of culture and economy but the one thing that remains a constant in my teaching experience is food insecurity. So many of my students struggle to find enough food for a week, a month, even just a single day, that this is never far from my mind. Most of Ration’s influences are plucked from the world at large rather than fiction. The economy of the human body is terrifying to me. How we parcel our days off in hours of labor, how we use so many words to refer to ourselves as objects rather than people, how so frequently we buy, trade, and sell names and identities. The very words “Human Resource” are one of the direct inspirations for Ration.

I loved all the different power plays between the characters—Glennoc and Tuttle, Glennoc and Cynthia, Cynthia and Ori, Imeld and Tuttle—and I thought they made the story even stronger. Were you intending to add these dynamics when you started writing, or did they develop as you got into the story?

My characters rarely do what I tell them to do. They find me and demand that I tell their stories and tend to get quite angry with me if I attempt to change anything. With that said, I wanted very much for Cynthia and Tuttle to reflect one another in a variety of ways. From touches of thoughts to a few shared desires, I wanted weave the narrative around the similarities of character. Imeld and Glennoc are similar in the fact that each approaches the world with a set of emotions that both Cynthia and Tuttle lack.

No matter how much I intended for the narrative to weave and braid the characters together, they set about their own activities with terrifying energy. My writing comes in enormous fits and bursts. I wait for my characters to tell me a story and then I attempt to sculpt the story into something presentable. These four wanted much more than I was capable of providing at first. Each demanding the story move in a different direction. My best intentions might remain but the characters themselves cut their own paths.

After reading Ration, I’m curious about the sorts of books you enjoy reading. Please tell us about some of your recent favorites.

I am in love with words. All words. I read nearly everything. Genre is not something I am overly concerned with in my personal reading practice. Instead I am the kind of friend who begs for suggestions from their book-hoarding colleagues. I have lists on my desk of fantasy novels that I need to read, Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch is gracing the top of that list. I have only just recently finished Borne by Jeff VanderMeer and am actively waiting for Dead Astronauts by the same author. I just started Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink and I’m hooked.

The truth behind all of this is that I have a book in every room of my house. I take sips from each throughout the day. Or as the necessity to dive deeper mounts, take larger and larger bites until my family must search for me and dig me out of the garage or the dining room as I am lost in whatever book is currently stacked there. In my house, bookmarks are a common clutter, paper strips and bits of yarn strewn here and there. The fancy stuff, actual bookmarks, are hoarded by each individual reader and rarely used. Instead, tables and desks are full of improvised placeholders and stacks of books ready to offer a few samples (or thirty pages) on the way by.

I can’t say this enough, but I absolutely love your writing style. Can you tell us a little about your background as a writer?

I earned an MFA from Goddard College and spent quite a bit of time dabbling in theater and independent film in my early creative euphoria. The true start of my writing requires rolling the tape all the way back to my childhood in rural Montana. Our house was in love with fire, from bbqs to woodstoves, fire was a part of our lives. My favorite slice of fire remains the campfire. My father would build these frequently in the back pasture of our home. Sometimes he would set up his teepee, sometimes he would simply start a small fire amongst the bones of the old fires, leaving the sky uninterrupted above us. My family is given to telling stories around the fire, most of which are humorous, more than a few touched with risky jokes and laced with the kind of humor that results in snorts and a collective happy boo from the crowd. But we were also given to ghost stories and myths. If one of us couldn’t remember a story, they would fill in the gaps, allowing the story to become something new and alive. I took this with me as I found my way first to theater and then to film. I wrote for both but discovered that I required a great deal more freedom than the strict mechanics required for stage and screen. By the time I was accepted at Goddard, I had found that I wanted to tell the kinds of stories that required me to feel my way through them, like finding your way through a fun house with the lights off and the shadows wild.

Now that Ration is out in the world, are you working on your next book?

I am. I am currently lost in a marina full of burned boats, their remains still and dark in a thick blue evening. I am waiting for a certain character to show up and tell me exactly what she needs from these long dead boats. I admit to being a little worried, the boats terrify me and I know the rain is coming.

Best answer ever! Finally, confession time. Please tell us three things about yourself that can’t be found on the internet.

I am an introvert, I love to sit in quiet spaces, read, dream, and write. But the moment I am forcibly introduced to a dance floor, I shapeshift. I can’t help myself. I won’t trouble you with images of my beard flying about or me bouncing across a dance floor but it is something I love to do. I have taken Argentinian Tango lessons, I will sing the words if I know them, and I will dance to damn near anything.

I am a sculptor, woodworker, and amateur photographer. I have a special affinity for driftwood and the kind of light that verges on liquid. I paint occasionally and have attempted to craft my own musical instruments far too many times to justify.

I did voice work for a computer app while living in Osaka, Japan. Somewhere in the world, someone’s computer is mumbling to them in my voice. How creepy is that?

Thank you Cody, it’s been fun!

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About the Author:

Cody’s stories have appeared in Pilgrimage, Cirque, KYSO Flash, Menda City Review, Swamp Biscuits & Tea, and others. He is fiction winner of the 2016 Montana Book Festival Regional Emerging Writers Contest and served as editor of the short fiction anthology Soul’s Road. Cody completed an intensive MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. He teaches at Portland Community College and works as a story editor. Cody grew up listening to stories in his grandfather’s barbershop as he shined shoes, stories told to him at bedsides and on front porches, deep in his father’s favorite woods, and in the cabs of pickup trucks on lonely dirt roads. Cody’s work explores those things both small and wondrous that move the soul, whether they be deeply real or strikingly surreal.

Find Cody: Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Amazon | IndieBound | Book Depository | Apex Books

Read my review of Ration