An Exclusive Guest Post from Ash Davidson, Author of Damnation Spring — Our August Discover Pick

There are so many rich, layered characters in the novel. Who came to you first?
Rich, the logger at the heart of the story. He walked onto the page—a slightly taller, slightly younger version than we meet in the book, but otherwise himself. The forest, the town, and the people around him changed. The 24-7 tree shot up taller than the Statue of Liberty behind his house, buildings went up in smoke, a child’s skull appeared on a logged hillside, but Rich stayed pretty much the same.
Why did you choose to tell the story from multiple perspectives?
There are so many rooms Rich just can’t walk into, both literally—Melody’s bedroom when she’s in labor, Helen’s kitchen as she’s grieving for Eamon—and figuratively. Rich thrives in this really dangerous, highly skilled job, yet he has a hard time figuring out what his own wife, Colleen, is thinking, so I added her perspective. But I also needed their son, Chub. Chub is five when the book opens. He’s closer to the ground, fully alive to the magic of the redwoods, the mist and ferns, the creeks and frogs, and he reveals things the adults around him don’t.
Tell us about your research for the book. How did you draw on your own childhood experience and family stories? What other books of environmental fiction did you read while writing this book?
My family left Klamath, California, where the book is set, when I was three, but my parents’ stories of Klamath came with us—funny stories, love stories, and sad stories too—car accidents, a little boy who fell on his pocketknife in the woods and was found days later. I used some of these stories as scaffolding, initially. I interviewed loggers, millworkers, and anti-spray activists in Klamath and I read—newspapers, logging histories, GAO reports. Two of my non-fiction favorites were The Last Stand by David Harris, about the hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber and the massive clearcutting that led to Redwood Summer, and Carol Van Strum’s A Bitter Fog about a community in Oregon struggling to protect itself from poisons sprayed from the air. There’s an excellent documentary on PBS right now, The People vs. Agent Orange, partially based on it.
How did the last year—the pandemic, the isolation—affect the experience of writing and submitting your manuscript?    
Well, I worked both my day job at a non-profit, and my early morning job—writing—from the same desk at home. The mental shifting of gears took some getting used to. I have a hard time concentrating in proximity to a refrigerator—I’d much rather snack than write. The dog helped. He’d steal a page and shred it. Sometimes a page just needs to be shredded.
As booksellers, we love to ask: what are you reading and recommending right now?
I just finished The Round House by Louise Erdrich, a beautiful novel wrapped around an ugly crime that’s also a crash course in structural racism in the legal system. I’m about to reread The Lowering Days by Gregory Brown, an elegant book about land and water and family set in Maine, gorgeously written. And I think everyone should pre-order The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad—it’s this sweeping historical novel set in Lahore’s red-light district—a detective novel, a war novel, a novel about class and power and blood ties. It comes out next year and I cannot recommend it highly enough.