CONVERSATION: Kerri Schlottman with Jakob Guanzon, On the Salton Sea, Resisting Capitalism, and Rereading the Death Card

"it’s reality itself reflecting back to her, you know?"

My relationship with Kerri began like so many great literary friendships before us: she slid into my DMs, asking for a blurb.

We’ve been friends ever since. And if you’re the company you keep then, by extension, I just might be as gifted a writer as Kerri. Her debut novel, Tell Me One Thing, floored me four years ago, and I’m thrilled to finally return the favor of all her support and verve by championing her latest novel, Daytime Moon (Unnamed Press).

Equal parts moving and propulsive, Daytime Moon follows Isa, a young woman adrift. When we meet her, she is working as a tarot reader in New York City after years on the run—geographically and psychologically—until her estranged brother, Cole, shows up on her stoop. It’s been ten years since they’ve seen each other. The man who raised them has fallen terminally ill. Once Cole convinces her to return to California to say goodbye, Isa is forced to face both the trauma she’d fled from a decade ago, as well as the decision to keep running or to forge some sense of home.

Because, as we all know, you can only run for so long.

My interview with Kerri was conducted over Zoom.

Jakob Guanzon: The setting of the book feels like the natural starting point. You chose a very particular place to set the majority of the story and I’m so curious about your personal connection to California as a New Yorker and also this fascinating setting at the Salton Sea.

Kerri Schlottman: Well, I grew up in Michigan, but my dad moved to Southern California when I was very young, like six or seven years old. My sister and I flew out there to see him once or twice a year and it was like going to a different planet entirely. Seeing the ocean for the first time was extremely transformational for me as a little kid, and then I became obsessed with the desert. It’s the exact opposite of the setting of my own life. That desert landscape is kind of unreal. There’s just so much to be said about it. And there’s a lot of metaphor, I feel, within it.

JG: Metaphor, huh? Thanks for doing the hard part for us. Let’s hear it.

KS: So, the story is primarily set at the Salton Sea, which is where the protagonist Isa grew up. It’s outside of Palms Springs if you keep driving east into the desert. Back in its heyday, people would go out there to water ski, swim, fish, the usual. Meanwhile, the Salton Sea was dying underneath them while they were having their fun, which is such an obvious parallel to the way everything feels right now with the environment.

That’s the first metaphor for the book. That setting also serves as a sort of embodiment of grief, being the site where Isa loses her twin sister Ella literally into the water as the environment claims her. It happens to other characters, too, who get cancer from living near the Salton Sea.

I mean, when we don’t take care of nature, nature can turn on us in that way. I’m not trying to hit people over the head with that theme, but there’s something to be said for it. Asthma is on the rise, women are having endocrine issues, pollutants are in the air, and storms are destroying communities—these are all instances where nature is actually killing us.

JG: I hadn’t heard of the Salton Sea before reading your book, and now I feel like I know everything about it. Tell me more.

KS: I totally became obsessed with the Salton Sea after seeing an Anthony Bourdain No Reservations episode where he went out there. It was formed from a breach of the Colorado River dam. Water flooded into the desert basin and created a salt lake that’s like 340 square miles. In the ‘50s someone got the grand idea to turn it into the “Salton Riviera” and market the mistake for tourism. There’s some symbolism!

But it has no natural source of fresh water, so between the salinity from that issue and the agricultural run-off from around it, it began to die. This was around the early ‘70s. The fish were poisoned by the water. Then, when the birds ate the fish, they were poisoned and died in turn.

Visiting the Salton Sea is a vivid experience. What looks like white sand all around it is actually bones. It’s part salt too, but mainly the ground-down bones from all this death on its shores.

JG: And there are communities living around the area.

KS: Yeah, people live around the Salton Sea. There’s a couple of small towns and even some off-the-grid fringe communities, even though it’s poisoned and the shoreline is continually receding. As it recedes, it becomes even more poisonous, because it leaves behind these toxic lake beds, and the wind blows the toxins up into the air for miles and miles. Not a great place for health reasons.

I got a chance to meet some locals while I was out there. Obviously, it’s not really up to them if they’re going to stay or not. The area is very economically challenged. It’s different and also not different from the kind of struggling rural area where I grew up in Michigan.

JG: You write about climate change in a very different way than what we usually see in novels, which tends to be like these recent post-apocalypse settings where there’s a lot of flooding and resource scarcity, that kind of thing. How did you approach this so differently?

KS: You know, I feel this changing environment in my body, like literally, as we’re living inside of what is essentially a dying ecosystem. But I couldn’t find any literature that was talking about it in the way that I felt it. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out exactly how to enter that kind of story that’s very present tense to me. This is right now, as we speak. Not a few years from now. Then one day, it clicked that this Salton Sea setting could start that conversation.

And so it gave me a kind of perfect place to bring a lot of these threads together—my obsession with the area on top of wanting to write about ecological collapse and how it’s so intertwined with economic collapse, especially in the grip of capitalistic dominance. The fact that we’re not more actively engaged or even concerned about these connections is really upsetting to me.

JG: It’s clear talking to you how passionate you are about these real-world issues, but, like you said, the novel itself doesn’t hit readers over the head with this message. How come?

KS: I remember talking to my friend Eric Micha Holmes, who’s an incredible playwright, after I sent an early draft of the book out to some agents. The feedback I kept getting was, it’s a beautiful book, but it’s too quiet. It just wasn’t coming through. Whatever I was doing just wasn’t hitting hard enough.

And Eric was like, if you give readers enough of a familiar story, then you can sneak in bigger themes and ideas. So I took this classic story and whipped it around in a bunch of different ways to see what else I might be able to get people to think about along the way. That’s how the novel took on the shape of a big city woman finally returning to her rural home (I mean, that’s like a Reese Witherspoon special), but then I clobber you with some environmental concerns and anti-neoliberalism along the way.

JG: Speaking of runaways, tell us more about Isa, your protagonist, and what’s up with her. She’s struggling in New York City. She’s pulling tarot cards all the time to try to figure out what’s happening in her life. She’s clearly adrift.

KS: Yeah, so, Isa is our runaway. When the novel starts, she’s a tarot reader in New York City. She’s also sort of an intuitive. She sometimes gets visions of what’s going to happen, but she also misinterprets them quite often. She ran away from the Salton Sea 10 years prior after her sister was killed. At the beginning of the novel, her brother Cole convinces her she needs to come home, because the man who raised them is dying. Once she’s there, she has to face all this stuff she ran away from.

The tarot in the book is also a device. It’s really interesting to me as a symbol of our desire for control, especially in the wake of trauma like Isa’s. When that kind of thing happens, I think we try to control the situation around us to save us from further grief. We want to control what’s happening in our environment or our future by at least knowing what’s coming, which isn’t really possible. Even in Isa’s moments of using tarot, it’s reality itself reflecting back to her, you know? The cards aren’t telling her anything, they’re just forcing her to finally think about stuff.

But yeah, Isa really feels like she’s an outsider.

JG: What about her relationship with Merce and how that’s a larger commentary on capitalism?

KS: Isa’s been living with this boyfriend, Merce, who’s a big capitalist. He wasn’t really that way when they first got together, but by now he’s fully in it. And that’s the exact opposite of her.

That relationship is also a device. It allowed me to have a conversation about this clashing of ideals through the lens of environmental harm, alongside Isa’s struggle to simply be the most natural, anti-capitalist version of herself. Merce wants her to get a better job and do more with her life. He’s upset by the fact that she’s okay wearing thrift store clothes and not having a lot of money. None of that worries her like it worries him.

Her intuition is sort of functional in that sense too. She misinterprets her visions anytime she’s being overly influenced by structure and capitalism or being sort of forced into situations. I don’t make that too obvious in the book, but if you track her patterns of behavior, that tends to be where she’s not trusting her instincts correctly. More symbolism for you!

JG: That’s why it really felt like Cole gives her a nudge in the right direction when he shows up unannounced on her front stoop in New York City and asks her to come back home with him. What is it about siblings that’s interesting to you? Cole and Isa have such a compelling relationship.

KS: I think the bond between siblings is really unique, whether you have a close relationship or not. I have an older sister who’s always been my protector. She’s very tough and used to beat up kids who were mean to me. I don’t know what I would do without her, but I also rarely get to see her. She lives in Northern California, fully on the other side of the country from where I am in New York City. And this kind of separation just happens as life does, similarly in the book. Despite the time and distance apart, I still feel very close to her.

And in the novel, Isa and Cole both have that too, even though it’s been 10 years since Isa left home. Cole has been carrying the trauma of their sister dying too. So they’ve both spent a decade traumatized, full of grief, unhealed, and without each other. Bringing themselves back to each other’s lives is the first step for them to not only re-bond but to finally begin to heal. And from there, they start this kind of journey to put together the hidden pieces of their family story.

I wanted to touch on the idea of what’s important and where value is. You know, if you’re not worried about a high paying job and a fancy car and a big bank account, then you’re thinking about family and love and friendship and how you can rescue each other.

JG: Yeah that reconnection between them kind of gets the ball rolling on all that comes after. And death also plays a large role in this book. It forces situations to occur and also helps set the stage for what ensues in Isa’s personal and emotional quest. Death is a hard topic though for a lot of readers. You don’t shy away from heavy emotional literature, which I appreciate, since I don’t either. How do you defend death, though, in your work?

KS: There is a lot of death in the book, but it’s purposeful. There’s some death that has happened before the story starts, which gives context to Isa’s situation as an adult. Like we talked about, her twin sister died and her mother also died in childbirth. And then there’s more that she has to come to terms with as the story unfolds.

At some point, she does a tarot reading for someone else, and it becomes clear that it’s actually for her. The death card shows up, and she defends it, because death isn’t necessarily an ending. It’s either a metaphorical or physical moment of transformation that pivots your life, whether you want it to or not.

I think that’s actually kind of a beautiful truth. Death is one of the most natural things that happens and will happen to all of us. I’m not a religious person, but I do believe in nature. And when things die, they become part of the soil. They become pieces of the land again, they return to the elements that we all came from. That’s kind of amazing, right?

Jakob Guanzon is the author of the novel Abundance, longlisted for the National Book Award in 2021. He was born in Manhasset, New York, and grew up in Minnesota. He holds a degree in sociology from Hamline University and a master of fine arts from Columbia University. He lived in Madrid, Spain for several years, where he began teaching, translating, and publishing prose. In 2015, he moved from Madrid to New York City, where he continues to live and work.