Ken Scholes Talks Writing Through Grief and Finding the Light in The Psalms of Isaak

Headed into Hymn, how were you feeling about the finale? Was it something you felt ready to tackle, or was it a mountain you had to psyche yourself up to climb?
Throughout the series I found myself running into a lot of mountains that required quite a bit of psyching up in order to climb.
The hardest part was trying to write in the midst of all of the losses and other life changes—like the birth of my children. When you experience a lot of that kind of stress all at once, it can leave you with the suspicion that perhaps all you’re going to experience is more of the same. That, combined with a rather ugly form of PTSD, helped reinforce those beliefs and made finishing the series a Herculean task.
I knew that if we could get the PTSD under control and create an environment that was peaceful for me to work in, I would be able to land the series. I was halfway finished with the last book when [fellow SFF author] Jay Lake died, and the loss of that close friendship set me back several months. When it was time to get back to work on the second half, I used the audio versions of the first four books to saturate myself with the world and characters, and that gave me just to push I needed—once I was in a new living situation. I moved into my new place at the end of February 2016, and by the end of March, the first draft of Hymn was done.

You’ve been very open about the losses that occurred over the course of your work on The Psalms of Isaak, and it’s not hard to see you working through that in this series. What did it mean to keep writing through everything that happened?
I wrote four of these five books through the hardest circumstances of my adult life: between burying my parents and one of my ex-wife’s parents, along with a grandparent, a nephew, a couple of aunts and a best friend, and ultimately, a marriage. I was already fairly familiar with grief and loss, but my experience with them grew exponentially. The part I wasn’t familiar with was the impact the grief and loss would take on my writing process. I didn’t realize there were things that could simply shut down my writing, and that I did not really have control over it. After a long stretch of years where I could pretty much write whenever I wanted to, this was a difficult discovery, and I resisted to the point of making an even bigger, tangled mess.
Of course, one of the benefits is that it was pretty fantastic research to experience so much stress and loss while crafting this particular series, and I think that it lent an air of truth to the story. It makes the loss and grief [of the characters] palpable. And I think as we swing into the last book, we see that cloud lifts in the direction of hope and homecoming.

Indeed, while there is violence in Hymn, it feels that for the most part, there has been a shift in how characters operate. The majority want to move beyond the war, beyond the hate, though there are still some that cling to the power of violence. Could you talk about this shift a bit?
That shift is in light of a really important dream at the end of Requiem. That experience gives many a sense that there is something better, something hopeful, on the horizon, and they begin to move toward it even as the tide of the war changes. [And that] leads those dominated by fear and anger to double-down on their own position.
As the characters begin to discover more and more about where they came from, I think it helps them rise above the tribal differences driving the conflict. What they all have in common becomes more important than what divides them.
Moving to a less weighty question, you’ve never shied away from mixing science fiction in with your fantasy, and in Hymn, we see those ideas pushed ever further. Was this an organic decision, or something you always envisioned in this world?
All of my writing is largely organic. When I wrote the short story that this all came from, I thought it was science fantasy, but I had only done enough worldbuilding for a single short story. I didn’t need answers to anything else, so I didn’t go looking for [them]. Once I thought it might be a series of short stories, it very quickly leaned in the direction of science fiction dressed up as fantasy. Really, it comes down simply to the point of view characters and the world they think they live in, and how they think it operates. It is fantasy in the sense that The Martian Chronicles is fantasy, because we know that there isn’t a civilization awaiting us on Mars, but if I were going to slap a genre label on it, it would be “distant future post-apocalyptic science fiction,” with characters who think they are in a fantasy based on their limited knowledge.

Something I’ve always admired about this series is that you’re not afraid to be mysterious—to let dreams be dreams, to let questions go unanswered. Is that a deliberate choice?
I think it is just letting life be life, reflected in fiction. Though, of course, as we proceed into the series, we learn that dreams aren’t just dreams, and that there are underlying reasons for them. But I absolutely leave questions unanswered, and typically like to end most of my stories with characters moving in the right direction rather than having already arrived. It feels truer to life. And the more true-to-life a story is without being too true to life, the more real it feels.
How did it feel ending the journey of these characters? Do you have one moment or character that you’ve fallen most in love with, or that was hardest to say goodbye to?
It felt really fantastic to wrap up. I feel like I spent enough time with these folks over the course of the last decade, so I can’t imagine missing them anytime soon. I think my favorite character became Marta, after her introduction in the fourth book. Before that, I think it was Rudolfo, and I particularly love his last scene, which largely came out the way I first imagined it nearly a decade ago.

I left plenty of room to tell more of the story. Most of it is rattling around in my skull, both the generation to come after and the generations before. If there is enough demand, I’ll certainly return to this world.
What do you have next coming down the pipe?
I have a nonfiction book in mind that is a blend of philosophy and psychology, and then potentially some short stories. For longer work, I am looking toward young adult or possibly middle grade. I want to write stories that my daughters can read. But after a really brutal decade, I am not planning anything with too much vigor. I am adjusting to my new home and my new job and enjoying raising my daughters in our new community.
Hymn is available now.