Rehearsing for the Apocalypse

Anna Marie Cain interviews Karen Russell about her latest novel, “The Antidote.”

By Anna Marie CainJune 21, 2025

• Fiction

WHEN KAREN RUSSELL STARTED writing her new novel The Antidote, Trump hadn’t yet gained a second term. When we spoke in March, Trump hadn’t taken over the Kennedy Center, revoked NEA grants, torn apart climate protections, or sent worldwide markets into an uncertain tailspin. When I finished transcribing our conversation, Stephen Miller was a day away from floating the idea of nixing habeas corpus, and Kristi Noem was 12 days away from demonstrating that she doesn’t know what the term—Latin for “you have the body,” a bulwark, at its core, against wrongful, top-down storytelling—means.

It’s been four months since Russell and I discussed her second novel over Zoom, and three months since the book hit shelves. Normally, I would have turned this in already, but because of the maelstrom of daily horrors introduced by this administration and their cronies, I’ve been caught in the same paralyzing spiral a lot of people appear to have been sucked into. Still, none of this rhetorical—and, in an alarming number of cases, physical—violence is new. Hate is not creative; it’s ridiculously predictable in its ugliness and narrow, often revisionist gaze. The GOP laid the groundwork for the current administration’s dismantling of democracy for years by attacking education and rewriting history to fit their ideology.

That’s why we need Russell—badly. The Antidote does not shy away from the darker parts of our country’s history. Instead, it uses them as the foundation to revisit conversations that continue to be bleached by, among other tactics, whitewashing. Set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, the book follows a “prairie witch” who uses her body as a “vault” to hold the secrets of others. When she awakes after Black Sunday—a real dust storm that brought near-total darkness and destruction to the Great Plains on April 14, 1935—the prairie witch realizes her entire cache of memories has been wiped out, leaving her bankrupt and in danger. Toggling between her perspective and those of a Polish farmer, a witch in training, a Black New Deal photographer, and a scarecrow, The Antidote is a reckoning with America’s desperate need to be the author—and, more often than not, the hero—of every story. In 2025, as X fills with community notes, young people get their news through TikToks, and AI appears convinced it’s still 2024, Russell’s book reads as an act of resistance against misinformation, echo chambers, and generational amnesia. Accountability, The Antidote insists, matters. “History,” as the aphorism goes, “doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

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ANNA MARIE CAIN: Finish this sentence: “If ignorance is bliss, then education, knowledge, is …”

KAREN RUSSELL: Oh, I don’t think I can Mad Libs just one word here. Knowledge is liberating, demanding, discomfiting, reassuring, beautiful, exciting, crushing, devastating, door-opening, revelatory, powerful. It can be all these things and more. Perhaps the seduction of staying in the dark has to do with our bodily apprehension that knowledge is transformative. Knowledge changes us.

Absolutely. An educated populous is dangerous to a power structure dependent on ignorance and subservience.

For sure.

At one point in the book, the prairie witch mentions the chilling answer to a question she’d been taught: “What is the evil this world runs on?” The answer: “Better you than me.” Variations of this phrase and theme recur throughout the book; did you begin The Antidote with it in mind, or did it reveal itself to you during the writing process?

As always happens, I’m usually the last to know what I’m up to in a draft. Often, repetition is what alerts me to some developing theme or question, some pattern that is emergent during the drafting process. In my own life, I have to work hard to manually reset the defaults, to pivot from fear to gratitude, from resignation to action. There’s a line after [the farmer] Harp’s father sees his brother receive a beating intended for him, and he’s horrified and sad for his brother, but also secretly relieved: Better him than me. Later, when he watches Andrew Dawson, a Black porter, contending with abuse from white passengers on a train, when he watches his Pawnee neighbors forced to leave their homes, he feels a version of the same. I think many people are familiar with that sickening feeling.

This book feels like a treatise against our country’s relationship to revisionist history … which feels even more relevant now that we have a compulsive liar back in office.

I know. In the book, Dell, a feral orphan and aspiring witch, says the past is not so sacrosanct; you could just make more up. She discovers how easy it is to give people a story they want to believe that meshes with their best hopes in a way that makes it easy to overwrite, distort or revise something based in fact.

Your inventory of the history education you received growing up in Florida is such an important footnote. I don’t know if people appreciate how much, in the US, our knowledge and the accuracy of our history and science depends on the specific, often geographically determined education we receive.

My understanding of the Dust Bowl was shaped by the work of the New Deal. Photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, with images like [Lange’s] Migrant Mother, stand in for collective memory. And, of course, The Grapes of Wrath, which I dearly love. But part of what researching and writing The Antidote led me to reconsider was how narrowly I had conceived of this ecological and economic collapse. The version of events I learned in school didn’t include colonial violence—and I never connected, as a younger person, the Dust Bowl exodus of the Joads with the dispossession of Native Americans who had been living on the Great Plains for millennia before the arrival of Europeans.

Our country loves to comment on the results of a situation without ever actually addressing the underlying cause.

Exactly. I think many people our age grew up with a very partitioned understanding of history. You learn about the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands by the US government in one unit, and the Dust Bowl is a separate unit—I didn’t grow up connecting these events. The conceit of the Vaults in The Antidote gave me a way to explore these “crimes of memory,” and their consequences. My research and conversations with people helped to widen the lens and extend the timeline of my own understanding of an ongoing soil erosion crisis.

Having an accurate account matters.

I think it’s interesting that to this day, a lot of mainstream understandings of the causes of this twinned economic and ecological collapse, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl drought, omit colonial violence. I really didn’t want to minimize the suffering of these desperately poor people who were losing their homes, but we need to look earlier, these ongoing waves of forced exile and dispossession. I used an imaginary town, but it’s set on Pawnee homelands, and there’s real history of the two towns adjacent: Brownlee and DeWitty. The latter, eventually renamed Audacious, was an all-Black colony of homesteaders right next to the largely white town of Brownlee, and they had picnics together, had integrated schools at a time when that wasn’t common. However, Brownlee survived the Great Depression and Audacious did not. And if you were to make a map of where the New Deal aid flowed and who it reached, it’s undeniable that in practice this support was never equitably distributed.  AAA checks for fallowing land reached white landowners instead of the sharecroppers and tenant farmers who worked the land; the Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which meant that 65 percent of African Americans were ineligible for benefits.

You could look at that map and see how white supremacy has structured and continues to structure our world.  That’s not to say other people weren’t really suffering—they were. But that colonial violence, which continues to be a driver of injustice and soil erosion all over the world today … it just feels like lunacy that it was not part of the story.

With the GOP’s push to erase anything that highlights colonial violence (among so many other things antithetical to their agenda), we’re losing important lessons—ones that might prevent us from making the same mistakes. If the settlers hadn’t been party to Native destruction, the land wouldn’t have been so devastated.

The drought would’ve come regardless, but the soil had been tilled to powder—so these apocalyptic dust clouds and the total bankruptcy of fertility came together to create something that I didn’t register before as being the cataclysmic loss for humanity that it truly was. I didn’t grow up thinking, We owe our existence on this planet to several inches of fertile topsoil. But it’s echoed by experts over and over: a sane society would design its policies around the ecological base of our existence. We wouldn’t pretend you can have unchecked growth and continuously strip the products of photosynthesis from the soil. I think a lot of people are famished, even in the United States, because for the last few generations, the plants we’re growing don’t have the nutrient density they once did.

It’s a physical representation of capitalism: we stripped the soil of something that was essential for longevity.

That’s exactly what it is.

The top bled the resources dry and moved on, then placed the blame on the public.

So many textbooks and mainstream understandings of this catastrophe say it happened because farmers didn’t understand. They went to an arid landscape and planted a thirsty crop. [But] the acreage wasn’t enough to make a real go of it. They were set up to fail by the Homestead Act. There wasn’t irrigation yet. They didn’t know they were sitting on top of this giant aquifer and now, not a hundred years later, we are a generation away from running the Ogallala Aquifer dry.

And with this administration ripping apart the EPA in favor of corporations whose products destroy it—

There are so many powerful financial incentives to just go on taking. To go on destroying the land and the water on which we are utterly dependent. Greed fuels a lot of this ongoing destruction, and many people are also pushed by debt and desperation to survive.

I don’t really believe most people are cartoon villains possessed by a desire to dominate others; I think we have an economy that runs on scarcity, on fear and engineered precarity. We have an individualistic culture that inclines many of us toward a mindset of competition instead of cooperation. The sociologist Avery Gordon [described living as] “the pain of being born into a contest that you did not design.”

A contest that is rigged—and the ones who rigged it keep assuring us that the system is working for us, when really it’s only working to consolidate wealth at the top and destroy guardrails that protect people and environments at risk.

Hannah Holleman’s amazing book Dust Bowls of Empire globalized my understanding of dust-bowlification, which was a crisis around the world caused by colonial capitalist expansion. It’s happening still. We can’t isolate the soil and pretend we can address our climate crisis without great social change. Technology alone won’t save us; we don’t need Elon Musk to take us up on his space fleet. Nature knows how to heal itself, and we have the knowledge and the tools to support that healing.

The book paints a vivid picture of an invasive species devouring an ecosystem, paralleling the locustlike destruction brought by the settlers. I think of the Albert Camus quote: “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” This pursuit to constantly revise and redefine ourselves shapes our ethics—and, at times, our memories—as well as our refusal to accept limitations.

That is a wonderful quote—and what a double-edged power we have, as you say, to define and to revise, to transform ourselves and our social contexts via the stories we tell, the laws we write and the lines we draw, the values we transmit and embody, this power to create reality. As the apocalyptic clouds of dust reveal, however, there are hard limits to this finite planet. Mimi Casteel, a brilliant regenerative farmer and agroecologist here in Oregon, once told me: “How wrong, to think you can stand outside a system that has taken billions and billions of years to create itself … If there is such a thing as blasphemy against this Life Cycle, it is what we are doing with industrial agriculture.”

Mimi and others whom I spoke to stressed that we don’t have to be the locusts, that there have always been and are still many cultures and societies and ontologies, many myths and stories also, where humans have an important role to play in the maintenance of life on Earth, in supporting photosynthesis, the process that gives us everything.

Since The Antidote takes place in the Dust Bowl, joy seems like a foreign concept to most of the characters. When it touches them briefly, especially Harp, it feels wrong to them. How do you balance finding and creating joy in the heavier moments of your work?

There’s a poet and writer I adore, Maureen McLane, who once wrote that she hoped to “resist apocalyptic anxiety without denying reality.” I find it really challenging, from one day to the next, to live in so many overlapping realities: we can see cities literally on fire, rubbled lives, overwhelming suffering; and then locally, you’re cuddled up with your beautiful lab, I’m taping peppermints to a board for my five-year-old daughter’s science fair project, there’s an honest-to-God rainbow outside my window …

Harp experiences his uncanny good fortune as something like a curse, and says, “Extreme luck is extremely lonely.” It’s when he has his belated epiphany about what he has to give that a new world really opens up to him, and his fist can relax into a palm. As McLane says, the trick is to figure out how to celebrate and cherish this wild life without denying reality or absolving ourselves of working for change. To carry water to put out the fires without being consumed by the flames. 

Not being consumed by the flames seems to be the hardest part right now. A lot of people are either ignoring the fire or are trapped in it.

I spoke to a neuroscientist who studies the motor system years ago. He told me all movement is a manifestation of optimism—you move because you believe you’re going to reach a better state. I’ve thought about how hard it can sometimes feel today, and how necessary, to hold a vision of the world we want to inhabit and to move toward that instead of rehearsing for apocalypse.

Oof, that hits. Rehearsing for the apocalypse feels like such a specifically American way of going through life.

The world would feel different if you redefined things we currently call “luxuries” as basic human rights. A quality education, the ability to age with dignity, green spaces and clean air, housing, healthcare …

There’s a fine line between trauma and laughter. As an author, you have an astonishing ability to balance dark matter with levity. Is it a natural inclination, to find levity, or is it something you actively try to do?

I would say it’s a natural inclination, and also one I’m drawn to in other people. My favorite writers are all brilliant tonal alchemists who can blend a howl of pain with a howl of laughter. In life, I am a clown, I love to laugh, I’m always joking. I’m the least funny person in my family, my siblings are so much funnier than I am, but I feel like I just keep trying, Skee-Ball style.

[In The Antidote,] I had to find a new tonal approach, to balance the humor and the horror, the sorrow and the joy. The final third of my novel escalates in intensity, and I was very glad when the cat [a comical presence at the beginning], sauntered back into the story. It felt intuitively right to me, to disrupt the escalating tension with a note of surprise and humor. I zone out of books that are monotone lyricism, because life doesn’t feel that way. In my own family, some of the darkest times have also been the times that people are laughing themselves sick. Or laughing ourselves well—maybe that’s the more accurate phrasing.

I love that.

I also think some things can feel unspeakable, and if everyone’s laughing, there’s an acknowledgment of it.

In the book, Pazi, a Ponca girl who is stolen from her relatives and sent to live with a white Christian family, is called a “dirty squaw.” When she finally receives an apology, she says, “Do something, don’t just say something.” The idea of “those who watch,” compliance, is revisited often. Is it just about taking that first step to be a part of making things better?

Mimi works with ranchers in Eastern Oregon [an incredibly red area], but she was saying that there’s a growing willingness in people to experiment with new ways of thinking about the land and the water. Wildfires don’t know about property lines; neither do toxins in the air. Some of these ranchers are now open to communally grazing, rotating crops, and rebuilding the watershed together in ways that aren’t bound by right angles on a map or words on a deed. I think about Rebecca Solnit’s question in A Paradise Built in Hell: how do we design policies that help people live in the best part of their natures, instead of pushing everyone to live in this defensive crouch?

I want to talk about the importance of memory within the book, as well as the loss of it.

If there really were prairie witches [with the ability to take away memories], I don’t know that anyone wouldn’t be tempted to forget some part of their history, at least temporarily. I would be. I think the truth is that most people do that work themselves, just tear a few pages out. Memory is selective, and people often reshape the past to justify their actions in the present.

There’s a line in the novel: “Something wants me to remember it.” It made me think of the marks trauma leaves inside and outside of us—all these people trying to get rid of their ghosts. I think most of us can, like you, see the appeal: forget the worst things you’ve seen or done, rid yourself of the shame. Shame doesn’t work the same for everyone, though. Maybe we have to reframe it as accountability. Then you wonder whether it’s better to keep your ghosts or forget them.

I found myself thinking about that a lot. Shame can support a really disastrous status quo.

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Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! (2011) and Vampires in the Lemon Grove (2013). She has been a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” prize and The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list (she is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, UC Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the endowed chair of Texas State University’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter.

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Featured image: Photo of the author courtesy of Karen Russell.