A Q&A with the author of Downlanders, Frank HAberle

Why Alaska?

Downlanders is a story about the “Great Alaska Adventure” many of us held in our imaginations when we were young. 30 years ago, I was one of those ill-equipped youth who dropped everything and took off with a backpack for Alaska, where I spent three months rambling, hiking, hitch-hiking, sleeping in tents and cars. I couldn't settle there; I was overwhelmed with a desire to keep going, and only came back down when I was flat broke and winter was threatening. At the time, I didn't have the courage or emotional resilience to find a job, find a place to live, and stay through the winter. Looking back, I wish I did. 

With Downlanders, I fictionalized the setting—creating the Grizzle Peninsula with an alternate postwar history and landscape—in large part because I have so much awe and respect and love for the real Alaska and the people I met there 30 years ago, I feel I’m unqualified to try to capture how amazing the real place was, and how beautiful the people were.

A lot of people write fiction with more than a little memoir thrown in. Is any of Downlanders autobiographical? Are you a character in the book?

I wish I was really a character in this book! I was never as brave, or independent, or resourceful as these characters. While some of the story is based on true event, the story and the people are largely embellished, or fabricated altogether. Two of the characters have traits that I would attribute to my younger self. Ernie struggles with alcoholic self-doubt and an almost-crushing dome of chronic remorse; and Danny is a hapless doofus, just along for the ride.  Other characters are based very loosely on people I met and travelled with up there—transients, seasonal workers, backcountry rangers, homesteaders, locals. Those people were a whole lot cooler, and more resilient, and more purposeful, and more courageous than I ever was.  

What drives you to write?

Chronic remorse is an amazing motivator; I find I’m still trying to fix, in my head, all the things I screwed up in my younger years, or things I should have done differently. And I’m a hopeless day-dreamer. I spend hours in the New York subways, back and forth to work, and I’m always drifting into stories and conversations that travel through my head. I talk to myself a lot. It’s a miracle I can hold onto a job. It’s been a really interesting practice to try to get these places and people and events pieced together into written stories. It was really peaceful to daydream about Grizzle on the B train. I don’t have a lot of time to write, but I feel compelled to try to write. The more you practice, the more it becomes a compulsive thing you have to do. Writing is the easy part, like knitting; the hard part is coming up with a sensible pattern to knit.

What do you think people will get out of the book?

Downlanders is an adventure story told from a different perspective than conventional adventures; it’s really a dis-adventure story. The characters are no not heroic adventurers testing their mettle; instead they are lost and damaged souls who get in way over their heads, and have to find something within themselves to find their way out. The story has a strong undercurrent of loss, and how to come to grips with remorse, and the challenges of addiction and finding your own path to recovery. But it’s also pretty funny; I think readers will enjoy the humor and the unique characters and I hope they will get into the relentless, unyielding wilderness and its influence on the people there.  

What's next? Are you working on a new novel?

Yes! I am working on a novel now that follows a down-and-out American transient to Dublin in the winter of 1986, trying to find somebody who owes him money; he befriends a pregnant teenager and her shifty boyfriend, and East German agents might be looking for them.  I have no idea how it ends, but it’s been a lot of fun riding the subway with this new set of people and trying to figure them out.