Dennison Smith's The Westward Hours: Nightmare of a Sacrificial America

Dennison Smith joins Mookie in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about The Westward Hours, a genre-blending literary dystopia landing in the US and Canada on September 8th. The premise starts from something genuinely real: in the 1970s, corporations quietly floated the idea in Congress of declaring the strip-mined Four Corners region a formal "sacrifice area," officially exempt from cleanup or accountability. It never made it to a vote. In Dennison's near-future America, that idea won by default: everything west of a single line in Kansas becomes exactly that, a sacrifice area, plundered for resources once corporate power fills the vacuum left by a government that climate catastrophe finally broke.Dennison and Mookie dig into what makes dystopian fiction actually work, tracing a line from Orwell's 1984 through Brave New World to the genre's current moment, where writers increasingly find themselves less warning about a possible future and more describing one already arriving. Dennison's own approach sets her apart from the genre's usual playbook. She's a committed "pantser," writing from character and sentence rather than outline, and describes how a minor supporting character seized control of an earlier novel entirely, and how two of Westward Hours' most magnetic, morally ambiguous characters emerged the same uninvited way. The novel took her a full decade to write, and she's candid about how history itself caught up with her mid-draft, what felt speculative when she started reads uncomfortably close to current events now.The conversation goes somewhere unexpected too: two and a half years Dennison spent living in the New Mexico desert after finishing the manuscript, learning to weave with a Navajo community, and how Native American conceptions of time, where the past isn't fixed but recurring, directly shaped both the novel's title and its structure. They range across Nabokov, Pynchon, and Norman Lear's famous miscalculation with Archie Bunker, land on a shared, sharp point about how modern media distorts our sense of scale and catastrophe, and, by accident, discover they grew up as neighbors in Chicago's suburbs decades ago.The GuestDennison Smith is author of The Westward Hours and two previous novels, The Eye of the Day and Scavenger, as well as a collection of poetry, Fermata. She holds both an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from University of East Anglia in the UK. She was founder and creative director of The Baldwin Gallery and Curatorial Team (London, England), curating dialogue between arts, cultures and nature and specializing in representing contemporary fine art by indigenous North American artists, whose lands stand at the front-line of Climate Change. She is also an interdisciplinary theatre artist and fiber artist. American and Canadian, faced with the recent sea change in US politics, she now makes her home in Alentejo, Portugal. More from Dennison Smith: https://www.dennisonsmith.comGet The Westward Hours: https://www.amazon.com/Westward-Hours-Dennison-Smith/dp/1739521167Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text!Support the show