This post was originally published on Audible.com.
In Country People, Daniel Mason makes a delightful departure into comedic territory as he explores the misadventures of an academically stalled professor who relocates his family to rural Vermont in search of inspiration and renewal. It’s a vivid portrayal of small-town New England life, with a compassionate take on creative paralysis and marriage. The ensemble cast, led by MacLeod Andrews and Cassandra Campbell, is an especially vibrant way to experience the story, with each narrator bringing distinct personalities to the book's colorful gallery of characters.
Tricia Ford: Even before the family makes the big move to Vermont from California for Kate’s job, Miles is struggling with his dissertation while his wife Kate is the genius everyone's talking about. That power dynamic could be painful, but you treat it with humor and tenderness. How do you write about marital tension in a way that makes listeners laugh and feel something?
Daniel Mason: I think that a sense of humor is part of what makes Miles and Kate’s marriage strong. It can be very hard if a relationship becomes uneven over time, but Miles has a great capacity—both a gift and a curse—not to take things too seriously. Kate, too. While Miles can be infuriating in his indirection, she knows he is deeply devoted to her, to their kids, and this is what matters. Her humor helps keep the rest in context.
The family arrives in Vermont with instructions to "keep the animals away." Without spoilers, what's the most absurd situation Miles finds himself in as a fish out of water?
As “city people,” the family has fantasies about country life that turn out to be very different from what they expect. The title is itself absurd: most of the “country people” in the book aren’t “country people” at all, but city people playing at country life. It’s hard to choose what surprises them most: the animals (who don’t stay away), the influencers and academics, the local legend about a passage to the inside of the earth...
Did you draw from real-life encounters with eccentric small-town characters? Who's your favorite supporting character, and which one surprised you as you wrote them?
Country People was in part inspired by a year I spent in New England researching my previous novel, North Woods, so I very much drew from my own experience in describing Miles and his cluelessness. While some Greensbury locals have bits and pieces of friends (and even more bits and pieces of myself), they are all fictional. As for a favorite, perhaps I’d choose Snowflake Bentley, whose seemingly “mad” project of categorizing the world’s foibles seems more and more sane as the book unfolds.
I must ask about the Jeremiah Wylkes Society. This secret society and their search for a mythical underground realm seems to anchor the novel's supernatural elements. Can you give us a taste of what happens when Miles attends his first meeting?
When Miles first hears the Wylkesians and their belief that there is a cave in Southern Vermont that leads to an underworld kingdom, he dismisses them as crazy conspiracy theorists. But as his loneliness grows, he decides to go to a meeting as a lark, and for companionship. Without spoiling the plot, it’s then he realizes they might be on to something…
From North Woods to this new novel, the supernatural seems to increasingly occupy space in your fiction. How has your relationship with the uncanny or mystical evolved across your career? Does your background in psychiatry influence how you approach these elements?
I very much didn’t expect the supernatural to appear in North Woods, but it surprised me (as I suppose the supernatural often does!) Same with Country People. If there is an underlying reason, maybe it is because I find myself drawn more to play in my writing, to the imagination. The supernatural offers so many possibilities. Psychiatry probably does figure in, but it is complicated, because in a clinical setting, imagination can often tip over into delusion. I found it fun in Country People to explore this borderlands where one becomes the other.
As both a practicing psychiatrist and acclaimed novelist, how do these vocations inform each other? Do you find your clinical work shaping how you develop characters, or do you try to keep these worlds separate?
I generally try to keep them separate. In psychiatry, we are looking for explanations, for patterns that draw out a signal from the noise, to guide treatment. Writing fiction, I very much want messy, complicated characters, whose inner lives remain something of a mystery. That said, I think there are similar impulses in that both fields require, and feed, a curiosity about the inner lives of others.
