A fresh and trippy portrait of the diverse underclass of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is a tragicomedy of one college dropout’s attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed workingman. Kim Kelly called the book “an arresting read that sinks its claws deep into your gut and dares you to blink. . . . a story of hard work, loss, exploitation, and family set against a backdrop of blood, ice, and heavy machinery at an Alaskan fish processing plant peopled by misfits, scoundrels, and ghosts.” Caitlin Solano asked Jake a few questions about his book.
Can you talk about your experience in the commercial fishing industry and how it inspired this book?
I was in college during “the great recession” and really broke. So, one summer, I got a job in a salmon processor in Bristol Bay, a lot like the one in the book: long hours alongside international workers, sleeping in bunkhouses, buying stuff from the overpriced company store, crap pay but lots of overtime, etc. It wasn’t as dramatic as the book, but we really did have deranged newsletters written by the processor’s manager, just like in the novel. It was a bad year for the fishery, and a lot of workers were fired early and sent home with almost no money after devoting a whole summer to the work. The day they fired half of the seasonal workforce, the “Alaska word of the day” in the newsletter was “adventure.”
I ended up loving Alaska, though, and spent more summers doing other seasonal work up there: tourism work, agriculture, whatever I could find. Just random stuff, like weed whacking around radio towers or babysitting cattle or playing in an unspeakably bad folk band. Then, years later, I got into working on a salmon troller in Southeast Alaska kind of by accident. So, while Slime Line isn’t autofiction, I know all the work described in the book pretty well. Except for herring. I never worked with herring.
I should also add that there are a few novels about commercial fishing and a lot of great contemporary Alaskana out there, too. For a while, I felt squeamish writing about Alaska when my experience there was so seasonal. But eventually I realized that seasonal work has always been the experience of many non-Indigenous people there. From trappers to fishermen to processors to pipeline workers and now, increasingly, tourism workers, the state depends on people coming and going seasonally. Slime Line is about those people.
When did you start writing the book? Did you always know you wanted it to be a novel?
I started it back in 2017 or so. At first, it was a long short story of about forty pages. It was maybe the third short story I’d really tried hard to write. I was just learning what I liked, so a few early drafts had some corny fairy tale stuff that was popular at the time. I abandoned it for a couple of years while I was writing a lot of essays, then started messing with it again while I was working on a salmon boat. A lot of the sea parts in the novel are taken from notebook entries or little poems that I wrote at night in my berth. But it was all disparate until January 2020, when I sat down and gave it a real shot. I wrote it in about a year, then spent another year revising it while working on other stuff.
I didn’t necessarily want it to be a novel, but I think it had to be a novel whether I wanted it to be or not. I was pretty committed to describing how the industry works—the way Paul Murray does with banking in The Mark and the Void, for example—and none of that stuff would fit in a short story. In some ways, the narrator’s obsession with his job at the processor came from my interest in describing the logistics of it all.
This is your debut novel—which parts of the process were the same as writing an essay or short fiction, and which were distinct to writing a novel?
All the joys and frustrations and doubts are basically the same. Some days, you sit down to write, and it feels like you’re absolutely mainlining the fictive dream. Other days, everything you write feels plastic. I try to remind myself that the reality’s usually somewhere in between. That’s the same whether it’s a novel or an essay, but the highs and lows are bigger.
The other thing I learned is that writing a short story or ten doesn’t prepare you to write a novel. Writing short stories teaches you how to write short stories. I trained myself to write with such compression and focus that I found it really hard to chill out and let myself meander, which is so necessary for early novel drafts.
I think that sometimes the MFA focus on short stories sets writers back, and writers should try (and fail) to write novels first.
The book has really great characters, and the reader can quickly get a sense of who they are in just a few sentences. What do you think makes for a great character introduction?
There’s that old cliché about how if you listen to someone hard enough, they’ll tell you exactly who they are. That might be the key to introducing characters, too: putting them in situations where they have to announce themselves to the story right away. If a character gets put in an awkward or vulnerable position upon introduction, there’s an opportunity for this weird bifurcation between a person’s persona and whatever is hiding under it. I guess that’s what I always go for—the interplay between a person and the way they present themself.
The protagonist often lapses into delusional thinking with his internal and external dialogue, reflecting his mental illness or substance abuse. Can you talk a bit about depicting that kind of frenzied perspective and mental unraveling?
Well, seasonal jobs like commercial fishing are a little frenzied in the first place. There’s a very limited time to collect this one resource, and it seems like the whole world hinges on its arrival. The seasons change so fast that it’s disorienting. Plus, it never really gets dark in parts of Alaska in the summer, which flips some people out. So, while Garrett’s really losing his shit in sections of the book, I think it’s reflective of the collective joy and anxiety of a whole ecosystem and economy dependent on the arrival of some fish. There’s a part where he describes the smell of the boatyard as manic. And that’s what it really feels right before the season opener. A collective sort of mania descends, and Garrett just embodies it more than other characters.
As far as mental illness, I had a pretty good sense of what Garrett felt like, but I tried to avoid pathologizing him on the page or even thinking about his actions as the product of mental illness or drug abuse. It drives me nuts when writers wield the DSM-5 on their characters. Saying that a character has something like bipolar disorder or complex trauma PTSD doesn’t get a reader any closer to what it feels like to be that singular human being. The feeling is what matters, and that’s more specific and complicated than a diagnosis. Two books really helped me get the voice how I wanted in those parts: Gabe Habash’s novel Stephen Florida (2017) and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, from the late 1800s. They both do a great job of writing from the perspective of delusional megalomaniacs without presenting them like a checklist of symptoms.
Which books or writers would you count among your influences?
I couldn’t have written this book without Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy. It’s about the misadventures of an ambitious rickshaw driver in 1920s Beijing. He also steals some camels, and then it rains so hard that his house caves in. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Very crude, working-class humor mixed with acute satire. They should teach it in public schools.
The other one is Halldór Laxness, the Icelandic novelist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1955 (the year after Hemingway) but was mostly forgotten for decades, partly because of the lack of Icelandic translators and partly because he was blacklisted for being a Stalinist. Most of his novels are about rural Icelanders encountering urbanity. There’s been a real resurgence of interest in his work, and now you can find most of his novels in trade paperback. Sontag’s essay on his novel Under the Glacier sums him up really well.
How has your career as a teacher influenced your writing?
Funny timing on this one! I have a lot of writer friends who teach because it gives them time to write, and that’s cool. But it never really worked like that for me. I taught full time for six years and always had to have a second job to make ends meet. Eventually, I noticed that I did my best writing when I was working those other jobs. I still don’t know why. Maybe because I had time to daydream. Maybe because my Fiction 101 students never cared about “Sonny’s Blues” the way I do, and sometimes that bummed me out too much to go home and write.
All that’s to say that I just quit teaching. Now, I work in a plant nursery. Everyone I work with is smart and artistic and funny. Plus, I have a great tan. The other day, one of my coworkers convinced some rich lady that our azaleas got smaller over time instead of larger. Smaller! I immediately wrote it down to put in a story. Stuff like that’s the beating heart of fiction, and I just never found it in the classroom.
Can you say what your next project will be?
I’m working on two novels. One is about an enigmatic plant breeder who, along with his cult of pupils, develops a psychoactive strain of geranium that allows those who sniff it to feel what it’s like to be a plant.
(I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to imagine what it’s like to be a plant.)
The other one is about two unruly small-town siblings in the mid-1990s who allegedly commit a wicked crime while under the influence of Marilyn Manson.
(I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to Marilyn Manson.)