INTERVIEW: Dan Leach by Michael Bible, "The Question of the Apocalypse or the Question of Language"
Michael Bible talks to Dan Leach about his new book, Junah at the End of the World, out this June from Hub City. Also discussed: South Carolina, original (and unoriginal) ways of speaking, Y2K & 9/11
I was supposed to interview novelist Dan Leach over the phone about his new book. We talked about everything imaginable except what we were supposed to talk about, his extraordinary debut novel Junah at the End of the World, a stylistic juggernaut that announces him as the torchbearer of great Southern experimentalists like Barry Hannah, Padgett Powell, and Mary Robison. The novel brought me back to many long afternoons daydreaming about falling in love before the world ended.
Dan and I talked for a few hours and we discovered all the answers to life’s toughest philosophical questions but I’m not dumb enough to give away those secrets here. You’ll have to discover them yourself. One place to start is Dan’s book. It won’t give you the answers right away but it will put you on a firm path toward honest revelation. After we got off the phone, I sent Dan a few questions and he was kind enough to answer them over email.
Michael Bible: Tell me about your experience growing up in South Carolina.
Dan Leach: If it does nothing else for you, South Carolina surrounds you with people who are serious about their idiom. It's warm down here (even in the winter), and the life-pace is glacial, and I guess this combination opens the moment for strange but mostly-original speech. The whole front porch thing has largely gone the way of the uncles, but when I was growing up (late eighties, early nineties) we had no choice but to talk ourselves through days that would’ve felt endlessly tedious if not for the occasional story or joke. I think this is why Samuel Beckett goes over so well with Southerners, right? He understood that no one’s going anywhere, and that distinctive language at least produces the illusion of movement. I’m hoping the novel captures this inertia, if only through its primary mechanism (the time capsule). Because, in a certain sense, Junah is indifferent to the question of apocalypse (“Will the world end in December?”) and way more interested in the question of language (“What are the sexiest sentences that will fit inside this shoebox?”)
MB: What was your experience with language outside an academic setting?
DL: Outside of academic settings–and I’m thinking here of “ordinary” spaces like the neighborhood cul de sac, or the back of the bus, or the parking lot after church–I think my experience as a kid in South Carolina taught me that most of the language that passes between young people is imprecise and banal. And, as a result of that linguistic carelessness, most of what’s said is forgotten almost immediately. Mind you, this was the nineties, so there weren’t any digital archives. You just said something at the creek, and it either stuck or it didn’t. And I guess forgettable language is not especially tragic if you don’t care about forming a connection with someone else through words (I understand many non-writers don’t). But if you had something to say, and if you wanted to be heard (especially as a short, shy kid with a speech impediment), you learned to find language that arrests the ear (via diction and rhythm) and the mind (via insight and arrangement). It didn’t matter that, at that time in your life, you couldn’t explain the technicalities behind why certain forms of language have power and certain other forms don’t. I guess one of the luxuries of being a nobody in South Carolina is not having to explain your obsessions. That and the quiet.
MB: Your book Junah at the end of the world is set at the turn of the 21st century. Is there something about that pre-9/11 world that interests you? A kind of prelapsarian time America?
DL: It'd be silly to say, “The innocence of that time.” But since that's what I initially wanted to say (and what I still, on some level, believe), maybe the real answer is something like, “The perception of innocence made possible by a mind that doesn’t carry the images and the implications of 9/11.” Columbine worked the same way, right? At least for kids who came of age in the nineties. That is–Columbine welcomed you into a future where the possibilities for violence were nothing like the little scraps you had in the old normal. So Junah at the End of the World takes up that bumpy transition into adulthood, you know? It’s much less about the apocalypse that didn’t happen (Y2K) and more about the apocalypses that happen to nearly all young people. The apocalypse of loneliness. The apocalypse of the first crush. The apocalypse of the sudden death of a schoolmate. I guess these forms of innocence die with or without a 9/11, but a plane in a building is a vicious way to say, “You are not in control here.”
MB: Talk about the anti-novel and your experience with David Shields. Who else do you see working in that vein? Ross McElwee? Joe Wenderoth?
DL: Joe Wenderoth is so damn good. Why isn’t he at least Lauren-Groff-level famous? His anti-novel Letters to Wendy’s was a direct inspiration for Junah at the End of the World. Did you know he’s written a sequel to that book? He sent it to me in an email, and it’s just as brilliant as the first one. Joe also has this amazing essay about his favorite strip club in Baltimore. It’s called “Where God Is Glad.” I’d teach it every semester, but I work at a Baptist college, and I’ll have students email my chair in response to a nature essay by Annie Dillard. But, yeah, the anti-novel is about all I read these days. David Shields and Aaron Strumwasser, both of whom I met at Warren Wilson, got me hooked on rippers like Bluets (Maggie Nelson), 300 Arguments (Sarah Manguso), and Sylvia (Leonard Michaels). These are books which, like Junah at the End of the World, embrace fragmentation, associative jumps, and essayistic riffing. They’re a real thrill to read, especially if COVID kind of jacked up your capacity for longform writing.
MB: Hub City has become a kind of southern publishing institution now. They recently lost a NEA grant due to government cuts. Why do you think it’s important for independent publishers outside New York to get support?
DL: That NEA thing is tragic, and the artists down here are still reeling from it. Hub City lost $25,000, a sum that would’ve contributed to printing/promotion of the books that follow Junah at the End of the World. And it’s not just Hub City either. SC Humanities & Arts took a hit. They’ve suspended all their grants for the upcoming year. And this in a state where To Kill a Mockingbird is a banned book. So it hurts me to see a place I love, which is already culturally impoverished, get squeezed even tighter. That said, I spoke with the brilliant Meg Reid, the executive director of Hub City, and she says the press will be alright. They’ve spent the last thirty years building a solid support system and establishing themselves as exactly what you called them–a “southern publishing institution.” To illustrate just how vital (and awesome) they are, consider their roster. Ray McManus, author of The Last Saturday in America, and one of the best living Southern poets–published by Hub City. Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, author of Sleepovers, and my vote for the heir apparent to Carson McCullers–published by Hub City. Ashley M. Jones, Stephen Hundley, Andy Anderegg–all among the most exciting contemporary Southern writers; all published by Hub City. I’m sorry, but there’s no less dramatic way to say it–Hub City is indispensable, and I’m bottomlessly grateful to be on their team.
MB: What are you reading these days that’s exciting you? Old books, new books? What films or music are you into?
DL: Mainly old books. I’m rereading Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment for a class on Dostoevsky I’ll be teaching in the fall. I’m also going back to Kafka (The Castle) and Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or at least their audiobooks, because running (for me) is so boring that I need a long, weird story to distract me from the fact that I’m dragging my tired body across the pavement. With films, I go through these obsessive phases where I’ll just rewatch the same movie (usually in half hour increments) for months on end. Right now it’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Before that it was The Big Lebowski. I’m not trying to study these films or memorize their dialogue (though both of these things inevitably happen). I think my life’s just kind of chaotic right now, and familiar images at the end of the day have a kind of therapeutic effect. As for music, I’ve been wearing out that 10th anniversary version of Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens. Even his demos are otherworldly, you know? I like “Should Have Known Better,” especially that part about the past being a “bridge to nowhere.”
MB: Who are the poets you think everyone should read?
DL: Matthew Olzmann. Cynthia Cruz. Richard Siken. Nick Flynn. A genius out of Denver named Phil Canipe, who writes well about depression and grocery stores. Maybe some old Charles Simic, whose prose poems are pretty wonderful. I mean, let’s be honest–some of the best poets around today are hiding out as songwriters. Adrianne Lenker and Karly Hartzman (of Wednesday). John K. Samson and Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster. And some of my favorites have gone over to writing essays. We’ve already gushed over Bluets by Maggie Nelson and 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso, but have you read “Butch Blowjob” by Jenny Johnson? It ran in BOMB, and it’s so damn good. What about “Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss? A gem. Unusually Grand Ideas by James Davis May has been a book I’ve been rereading for the last year. Same with Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates. I like studying the lineation in both of those. But there's only one poetry book that I'm always reading. When I say “always reading,” what I mean is that it just stays in my car and in my office and on my nightstand, and as soon as I finish it, I immediately restart it. I've been doing this for five or so years now, and I can't really explain why I love it so much, except that no matter how many times you read it, its images never seem stale, and its movements always feel pure. That book is What About This by Frank Stanford, which is his collected poems. A friend of mine recently called Stanford a “young man’s poet,” which is a fair criticism but also frequently untrue (since I know all kinds of different people who connect very seriously with Stanford’s work).
You can support the work that Hub City Press does by donating here, or by purchasing their books here.
Michael Bible is the author of the novels Sophia, Empire of Light, The Ancient Hours (Melville House) and Little Lazarus (Clash Books). He’s the screenwriter of the feature film Dogleg, now streaming on MUBI. His work can be seen in The Oxford American, The Baffler, Paris Review Daily, New York Tyrant, Forever Magazine, Southwest Review, BBC Radio, The Guardian, Joyland, and LA Review of Books, among others. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Believer, and NPR. Born in North Carolina, he attended Sewanee: The University of the South and received an MFA from The University of Mississippi under the mentorship of Barry Hannah. He lives in Manhattan.
Dan Leach has published poetry and fiction in The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. Junah at the End of the World, his debut novel, was released by Hub City in June 2025. He lives in the lowcountry of South Carolina and teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.