A little while back, I wrote a review of Ken Layne’s excellent new book, Dignity, for the good folks at TheRumpus.net.  Layne is always fascinating, always insightful, and always hilarious.  He didn’t disappoint when I interviewed him.  Take a look at it below.

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The Nevada Review: Tell us about yourself.

Ken Layne: I am a writer and live happily next to a desert national park.

NVR: You are a musician, a political blogger, and a creative writer.  How do the three elements work together?

KL: I’m really just a writer, and at times I write songs because that method is best for the story I’m telling, and I’ve worked for Internet publications for many years because that has been a better fit than working in newsrooms, which I did regularly from the 1980s until about a dozen years ago.

NVR: You used to live in Nevada.  Tell us about your connection to our state.

KL: The U.S. southwest is my home.  I was born and brought up in New Orleans but I’m a third generation Arizonan, sort of.  (My grandfather lived much of his life outside a dusty little desert town called Phoenix, and my father was raised there, and I spent my middle-school years there.)  A few years later, while living in San Diego, I began hiking and camping in Death Valley and the surrounding mountains and towns.  I’ve probably spent more time in Beatty than anyone who doesn’t live in Beatty.  Mount Charleston was my first peak of any significance—I got hypothermia because it was ice-axe work up the top third of the mountain, and I was wearing jeans and leather boots like a fool.  My mountaineer buddies fed me campstove soup and tea and huddled around me until I started making sense again.  Five-day hiking trips followed by midnight raids of the Stardust buffet, that was the system in my early days with a driver’s license.

My wife and I moved to the Virginia foothills outside Reno early in this century, and lived there for about five years.  She managed a big nature preserve and working cattle ranch on the Carson River.  I drove up and down the 395 a lot and made some records and worked for a couple of Gawker Media websites.  We covered a lot of Nevada by road and by foot, from Great Basin National Park to Pyramid Lake, the Carson sink, the great old cowboy/Basque towns of Ely and Elko, and the parallel wooded mountain ranges that come one after another from Tahoe to the Great Salt Lake.

I love open spaces and wild rivers and pinyon-juniper mountains and the arid west, and Nevada’s got plenty of that stuff.  And especially up in the northern half, it’s got a real scarcity of people, which is my ideal situation.

NVR: You’ve written about Nevada in your music and prose in the past.  How does your writing in and about the state differ today?  Do you see the state any differently than when you lived in Reno?

KL: The 395 is my road, it’s the line that connects all the parts of my life in the West, specifically the deserts and the Eastern Sierra.  I don’t really think of Nevada as a separate part of that, just like when I’m in Death Valley or swimming in Tahoe I’m not thinking about state lines.  I don’t gamble and don’t frequent brothels, so the political boundaries aren’t particularly meaningful for me.

Like everywhere I’ve ever lived, I sometimes feel that I didn’t get everything out of Reno when I was there.  It’s got a lot of the stuff I despise about American life—the subdivisions and strip malls and eight-lane freeways and chain stores and guns and meth and suburban faux-extremist middle-aged white people.  But it’s also got a heart and a brain and the Truckee and UNR and the old downtown, and those are the parts I miss.

The place I’ve spent more time than anywhere else in Reno (or the entire state) is a little no-name canyon that was behind my house.  It’s where I hiked for miles every single day with my dog, hours of every day for several years. Our family computer is always on the screensaver slideshow, which is a great way for your kids to always see pictures of their family and friends, and there are endless pictures of the trails back there and my oldest son as a baby and all the critters we encountered.  We had a couple of herds of mustangs in the hills and many happy days watching the foals learn to run.

NVR: Tell us about Dignity.

KL: Dignity is my attempt to make sense of our time.

NVR: Why does it seem like a necessity that Dignity is set in the desert West?

KL: The desert is welcoming to those who pursue silence and mystery—if you can find a spot the off-road motorcycle people haven’t destroyed.  It’s also my home, where I’ve been running around and getting lost for thirty years, and I try to write about what I know.

NVR: It seems pretty clear that you are doing more than just telling a story.  What is the reader supposed to do with your book?

KL: A reviewer online somewhere said that he doubted my book would make people drop their smartphones and abandon their careers to live as squatters in unfinished exurban housing developments.  And I thought, of course not.  That doesn’t really happen to anyone in the book, either.  The people in Dignity have been spit out by a techno-autocratic civilization in retreat.  They have no jobs to quit, and they have no moneyed lives to give up.  They’ve made the best of an awful situation, and over time they discover ways to insulate themselves from the continual shock waves.

I want to entertain with a good story, and I want to plant some ideas in the process. If those ideas help readers prepare in their own ways for living a more satisfying existence with less reliance on entertainment and debt and gossip about people they will never know, then the book is doing its job.

NVR: In my review I described it as sort of a Biblical work that embraces the mysticism of John Muir and Edward Abbey.  Is that what you intended?  What has been the response so far to it?

KL: The response has been very pleasing.  I wrote something about as serious and unfashionable as possible, in large part because I couldn’t find anyone willing to talk about these things.  And the book is finding an audience, and they are reading it deeply—and it is intended as a religious book.

NVR: Explain the transition in your life.  You went from being a prominent blogger, someone who was actually a part of the founding class of political bloggers, to someone writing about the tragedy of the Internet.

KL: I don’t have any actual interest in politics.  I am interested in art and wilderness and philosophy, but there’s not a lot of career options for writers in those fields.  So I’ve worked as a newspaper reporter and wire service editor and eventually as a writer of online publications.  I’ve used writing as a way to travel the world and live in a lot of interesting places—I spent much of the 1990s living in Central Europe and the Balkans—and I still use writing as a ticket to go places and do things.

The only transition that’s apparent is that I move around less frequently now that I’ve got kids and a dog.  I’ve only moved six times in this century, so far, and I haven’t lived outside America since Al Gore won the White House.

NVR: What are you up to now?  What projects are forthcoming?

KL: Struggling with a new book.  A novel.  Like my previous two novels, it takes place in Alta, California—including the part we now call Nevada.