Julian Zabalbeascoa and Scott Preston: On Finding the Right Voice, Writing Violence, and Their Debut Novels ‘What We Tried to Bury Grows Here’ and ‘The Borrowed Hills’
Julian Zabalbeascoa reached out to me while he was staying in Northern Ireland as we had both written novels that grappled, in different measures, with nationhood, violence, and sheep. Although Julian is a veteran short story-teller and writing teacher, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here (Two Dollar Radio, 2024) is his debut novel. A breathtaking look at the Spanish Civil War, told as an impressionistic tapestry of first-person narrators: each chapter a voice from the swell of men and women, fighters and children, loyalists and journalists, who took part in Spain’s bloody fight for democracy. My own first novel is The Borrowed Hills (Scribner, 2024), a neo-Western set in the hills of northern England, and was released in July 2024. In our conversation, we discuss writing craft, our origin stories, and the fine line between trauma and entertainment.
Julian Zabalbeascoa: The Borrowed Hills is one of my favorite novels of the year (one of my two favorites, to be precise), so I’m really excited for this conversation. It has joined the thin roster of novels I’ll be picking up every few years so that, 1) as a reader, I can relish in its language and, 2) as a writer, I can be reminded of the coordinates to the North Star. It is a true wonder, exhilaratingly original. Every page had me awestruck. This is, in part, because of the voice of your narrator, Steve Elliman. It captivated me immediately. I’d have followed Steve anywhere. I read that the first drafts had a more conventional narrative tone that you’d break out of for dialogue and that, ultimately, the voice in the dialogue became the voice of the narrator. In which ways, if at all, did this change take the book places it otherwise would not have gone?
Scott Preston: The evolution of the voice was messier than that. It started out as you’ve said—the narrator was your typical otherworldly third-person voice who spoke in pompous literary English, and the characters’ dialogue was in broken English, mimicking the Lakeland dialect of Cumbria. But I realized how wrongheaded that is. Cumbrians don’t speak in broken English, and the idea of a narrator talking in the Queen’s English, then putting on a silly voice for its characters, is insulting. So, I wrote the whole thing in Cumbrian and made a point of writing it to be as poetic and thoughtful as anything else I’d create. Over time, I drifted to a first-person narrator as it better matched the Lakeland dialect: a spoken language. Initially, the narrator was still telling a third-person story about other characters, and then that narrator, Steve, took the story for himself and became its protagonist.
Speaking of narrators, What We Bury does something interesting with them by having so many and keeping them in first person. Something I wouldn’t be brave enough to attempt. What was it about the story you’re telling, this expansive picture of the Spanish Civil War, that made you choose a chorus of voices?
JZ: As with the voice of your narrator, there was an evolution on this front. Originally, I had two alternating timelines. One followed Isidro through the Spanish Civil War, another focused on his children and grandchildren as they dealt with his legacy in it. If you were searching for heat in the novel, you’d find it in the Spanish Civil War chapters. Regardless, I was determined to tell this multi-generational story, giving the world the Great Basque-American Novel it didn’t realize it had been missing. It took me a long time (i.e., eight years) to realize this structure wasn’t working. All the while, I had these voices inside me, voices from the Spanish Civil War, that I kept silencing because, were I to scrap the present-day timeline and have a novel solely of narrators from the Spanish Civil War—well, I’d never read something like that before, so I didn’t think it was possible. Not until I picked up Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, an oral history of Russia and the Soviet Union, did I encounter a chorus of voices on such a scale. This gave me permission to allow these voices their time at the mic. I ended up abandoning myself to them. These narrators, what they had to show me, dictated the scope and structure of the novel. I chased after my characters, trying and sometimes failing to stay out of their way, and only after I felt myself emptied of them could I see the bigger picture: the Spanish Civil War touched mostly everyone. Few were spared. The novel, with its structure, attempts to reflect this.
Similarly, were there any books that gave you a sort of permission to go all-in on Steve’s voice and tell a story as unique as his voice? Another way to ask it: were we to swab The Borrowed Hill’s gums and send the saliva sample off to a genetic testing service, what might the results bring back?
SP: I think giving permission is a good way of putting it, and there are two writers who did that for me. The first was Jack Kerouac, specifically in The Subterraneans when he was at his most wild, with its page-long sentences that are breathless and highly readable. I was taken by this idea of trying to capture the feel of jazz in a book. Translating something abstract into a coherent story. I wanted to do the same with someone spinning a yarn in a pub, to take that rambling energy and put it into writing. The second writer was James Joyce. I’ve never actually read one of his books, only bits of them, but for a force of nature, he’s surprisingly silly. There’s a line in Ulysses where he describes an undertaker as being ‘in a hurry to bury’ and that was a real permission moment. It’s something I noticed again when researching the Child Ballads with all the ‘thick, thick blood’ and ‘long, long hair’. The same playfulness. Stupid rhymes, repetition, clichés, fart noises. It’s the stuff we love. There’s no reason to avoid it and I put in as much as I could.
JZ: Proceeding with this playfulness and energy, what’s your goal or framing for dialogue—should there be one? What was the revision process like? You use dialogue sparingly, oftentimes characters are talking over each other, and it is consistently funny and/or crushing in its brilliance and sharpness. Rarely do you tell your reader how a line is said. Do you have authors whose dialogue you admire? It seems no review of The Borrowed Hills is allowed out the door unless it mentions that the novel contributes to the neo-noir genre, but, for me, the dialogue was the most noirish component of it. Lines that could come out of Humphrey Bogart’s mouth or repartees that you’d expect to find in a Raymond Chandler novel. And, on this front, though the American and British covers might not hint at this, there is so much humor in The Borrowed Hills. Why was humor an important texture to include in this story?
SP: The dialogue is one of the more organic parts of the novel. I approached each back-and-forth like a set-up and a punchline, with two characters wrestling to move the story forward. Then cut it back as much as possible. You mentioned humor—it was working men comics like Frank Randle, Al Read, and Eric Morecambe who shaped the dialogue. When literary people write in dialect, it often starts and ends with words and accents. But that’s caricature. The good stuff is how we tell stories, and without the humor and the punchiness, you’re not even close. I think, if you’re writing about the working class, you need to draw from working-class artforms (folk ballads, stand-up, etc.) and write for working-class readers. Otherwise, you risk being exploitative.
Let’s get back to the blood now. It’s something both of our novels have plenty of. In The Borrowed Hills, it’s largely sheep blood spilled during the scourge of foot-and-mouth, and in What We Bury it’s the blood of war. No matter how we try to dress things up, a novel is, on some level, there to entertain. Did you give much thought about how to manage violence, violence drawn from the real world, or what you wanted readers to take from it?
JZ: I’m thinking of that line in Philipp Meyer’s The Son: “The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean.” If you’re going to write about a civil war, you shouldn’t shy away from showing that war’s contribution to the rivers and oceans. The aim is to perhaps be like that figure in Picasso’s Guernica reaching across the top of the frame, the one holding out the candle that lights the nightmarish scene. The light doesn’t discriminate what it reveals. We should strive to not blink or judge, as well. But you’re right that, though it might seem a four-letter word to some scribes, we seek to entertain. I’d say one of the means to achieve this is through language, which you do so marvelously in The Borrowed Hills, in finding new ways to describe and pace a moment and scene. To that, The Borrowed Hills is equally arterial. Did you ever have any concerns about just how much blood was spilling across those early pages? What was your approach to representing it on the page? An underlying philosophy? And any surprises or insights in how readers have so far responded?
SP: I didn’t think of The Borrowed Hills as a violent book when I sent it out. In writing about the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, my only thought was how to do it justice and to give Cumbrians the recognition they’ve been denied. To me, that meant capturing the terror of the culling and using precise imagery. That’s naturally intense for many readers, but if I’m honest, I still don’t think it is an especially violent book, at least in terms of bloodshed. There’s only two violent human deaths in the whole thing. What I did have in mind was how tame stories about the Lake District are. I wanted a book that felt like a loaded gun in your hands. And I think that’s where the real violence is—in the muscular language, the bleak landscapes, the hard-edge view of the world. So, when that violence does hit, it’s amplified beyond the few sentences it takes up.
Thinking of why I started writing the novel, as a reaction to the slow extinction of Lakeland life, it makes me want to ask, what drew you to the Spanish Civil War, and was there something in your life that revealed the story you wanted to tell?
JZ: The novel began long ago (we’re talking Obama’s first term), born from my concerns about the growing polarization and partisanship in the US. I sought about for precedents and found one in the history of my ancestral lands. My dad left dictator-controlled Spain to work in California as a shepherd, and as a child we’d come back here a bit. At this moment, I’m sitting in the family home, looking out the window at the Basque Country’s green folds and rises. Beyond them, just to the south, is Gernika, which was the site of the first carpet-bombing of its kind in human history. It’s the closest town to our village. Growing up, most of my immediate family lived there. The story of its destruction always felt like a part of our story. It got me wondering early on about what would compel someone to leave their homes to go off and destroy another person’s, how ideas can turn us rabid, encourage us to gleefully strip the humanity from those not under the same flag as us, and even give up our one glimpse at life. For me, I was at a generational remove. Many others aren’t so fortunate. But those early seeds later mixed with the growing divide and vitriol I was witnessing in American life and politics. Now, I’m not saying civil war is the only conclusion to what we’ve been doing to ourselves in the US, but the Spanish Civil War does provide a warning.
Returning to The Borrowed Hills. Growing up, while I was here a bit, the larger chunk of my first twenty-plus years was spent among my family’s sheep—a possible reason there’s so much blood in the novel. Ranch work has it all—every type of birth, every sort of death. Despite a lifetime of being among sheep, I doubt I could have written with such authority and poetry about them and those who raise them as you did in The Borrowed Hills. Even appositives humbled me. Did you draw from life experience for this aspect of your novel? If not (or even if so), can you describe your research and your process converting that to the page?
SP: Some parts are drawn from real life more than others. I’ve never birthed a lamb. I have been chased by a few dogs. Most of it comes from my grandparents, who were national park wardens, and my dad, a lifelong dalesman. Had to be some payoff to being dragged around the fells my entire childhood. A lot of research went into the book, to the point that half the scenes are drawn from folklore, hunting ballads, news stories, local color, and tales of the Old West. There was no magic to it. I watched archive footage of surly farmers, read histories of hedgerows and corpse roads, biographies of Cliven Bundy, and wrote long lists of common names for sheep diseases. The egotist in me would like to create an annotated version that tells readers about the Helm Wind, Lanty Slee, Phoenix the Calf, Herne the Hunter, the poetry of Robert Anderson, and Westmorland Wrestling. But that would ruin the mystery.
JZ: Every sentence reads as organic to Steve. Yet they’re so well-tended that, per George Saunders, they become a living thing in the world. None disrupt from the narrative. In fact, they are the narrative. Regardless, so many times I’d practically set the novel down to applaud what you’d put on the page. Rereading the novel now, I marveled the other day at this pair, and was wondering if you could provide for us an anatomy of them. From a craft perspective, what goes into sentences like these (in the scene, Steve has been brought to Colin’s van): “Stuffed tighter than a whale’s skin, smelled liked a sneeze, boxes and boxes stacked to the roof, watches, speakers, computers, televisions, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, all tied back with bungee cords, and there were posh wool coats and fancy trainers and in the middle were these legs and shoulders of meat, cuts of lamb dressed and hung on butcher’s hooks. Fresh enough to put blood on your hands.”
SP: Let’s see if I can reverse engineer it. First, I try to avoid clumsy metaphors: ones that aren’t making an idea clearer for the reader. These two are on the edge for me, because where’s this whale come from and what does a sneeze smell like? They’re just evocative and instinctive enough to get a pass. Second, with the rhythm and rhyme, in parts I’ve planned out schemes and meter (the Steve and George boxing scene is the best example), but I think when you stick to Germanic words and ditch the make-believe grammar rules, it comes naturally. You let it happen. Sentences end when you’re out of breath or bored. Not when H.W. Fowler says it’s time for a full stop. And it isn’t a coincidence that English words describing, say, butchery go well together and sound right and create powerful imagery. Centuries of butchers did the work for us.
I want to go back to what you said about the origins of your novel: that you wanted to talk about growing political divisions in the USA. A line that stuck with me was, “their identity had become annihilation,” and it’s strange how ideological differences can feel so important but, in the end, many of these conflicts look the same. Did you feel you learnt anything from the Spanish Civil War that helps you better understand the nature of what’s happening now?
JZ: Perspective, most certainly. We’re encouraged to think of every new ideological front that opens as the decisive battle that must be won, when in fact, though the stakes are high, it is rarely the case. Lord knows I’m guilty of falling for that one before. The real fight is against those determined to fill their pockets or amass more power by dividing us. In the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War, the middle ground had emptied, the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum fattened their ranks. Violence became one of the few means to respond to those you disagreed with. I’m not advocating for a sort of political apathy or passivity these days, nor centrism, god forbid. But democracy means maintaining a conversation—with those you agree with, those you don’t, and even those so disillusioned with politics that they’ve tuned out. The kicker is that so many Americans go from their homes to their cars to their offices to their cars back home. Maybe at work they’re engaging in meaningful political discourse. Otherwise, it’s online, where the algorithms don’t evoke our better angels and where so many of us exist in information bubbles that pull us further to one corner of the ring or another. And this is before you factor in the dangerous possibilities of AI. So there’s work to be done, certainly. Which isn’t a bad thing. It encourages engagement with the community you belong to. The alternative is solipsism, a turning inward, away from the world.
As for the annotated version of The Borrowed Hills, I’d be queueing up outside the bookstore for it the day of its release. Assuming that isn’t your next project, can you offer any hints on what we might expect next from you?
SP: It’s a psychedelic sci-fi adventure novel about a linguist who travels to a distant planet to decipher an alien language no one else has been able to. It’s Alice in Wonderland meets Planet of the Apes meets Heart of Darkness meets ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ meets Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These comparisons stick—so I’m trying to get in early.
How about you, any plans for what comes after What We Bury?
JZ: That sounds amazing. Godspeed on it—I’m impressed by the distance you’re traveling between Novels #1 and #2! Unlike you, my Novel #2 is only traveling through time, not space. I’ve a working draft of it. Once more, I’m in the Basque Country. But rather than taking place during the late 1930s, we are now in the last month of the millennium, back when I was studying at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastian. It was also when the terrorist group ETA walked away from their ceasefire. The novel, told from three different POVs, focuses on the latter event: not one sentence is dedicated to the former.
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Julian Zabalbeascoa’s fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. He divides his time between Boston and the Basque Country in Spain. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is his first novel.
