Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote, was born of a single image: A woman holds a sparkling emerald-green horn to her ear through which she receives someone’s secret and stores it for them, as if she were a living, breathing bank, a vault of flesh and bone safeguarding the memories of others.
Karen Russell, author of The Antidote. (Credit: Boone Rodriguez)
Russell was writing her debut novel, Swamplandia!, when this witch appeared to her in 2009. Two years later, Swamplandia! (Knopf), a New York Times best-seller, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, adding to the young author’s already impressive accolades—among them a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award and a spot on the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list. Far from idling on these laurels, Russell’s prodigious imagination was already spinning her follow-up, which centered on that witch. In a 2012 craft lecture for the Tin House Summer Workshop called “Engineering Impossible Architectures,” she discussed this novel-in-progress, from its setting, the American Dust Bowl, to the sentient scarecrow that plays a pivotal role in the plot. The following year, her then-boyfriend, now spouse, Tony Perez—a freelance writer, editor, and screenwriter who at the time worked for Tin House—said that at one point Russell sketched out the fundamentals of the story for him, from characters to ending scene. “To a rube like me,” he says, “it seemed like it was just a matter of sitting down and typing it up.” So why is it only now, sixteen years after its inception, that readers will finally be able to hold The Antidote in their hands?
In her Tin House lecture, Russell said, “To earn the authority to present a scarecrow as a viable character to readers, I felt I needed to acquire a deep knowledge of the history of the Dust Bowl—a familiarity with the soil in which he is, literally, staked.” The more knowledge she acquired, the more she discovered how much of that history had been kept from her, as it has been kept from so many Americans, deliberately hidden, like a murdered body buried over a century ago in desiccated guilt and shame. For Russell, the process of exhuming it required not just the wider, longer lens of middle age, but a collaboration with teachers and friends and a willingness to face the nightmarish reality of the so-called American Dream of westward expansion and her own place within it.
Weaving a tale of this magnitude does not happen with a click of the heels. In Russell’s case, The Antidote represents a synthesis and expansion of themes she has been exploring her entire writing life.
The novel begins on April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, a real event of biblical proportions when winds of up to sixty miles per hour whipped an estimated three hundred thousand tons of drought-stricken topsoil into a storm that blackened the afternoon sky across the Great Plains and inspired the term “Dust Bowl.” When the storm hits the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, the Antidote, a prairie witch, is handcuffed to a flimsy cot in the town jail, prisoner of the sheriff who uses the witch’s power to cover up for his corruption and inadequacies as a lawman. For fifteen years, the Antidote has been acting as a magical memory bank in Uz, hearing the townsfolk’s confessions through her ear horn and warehousing them within herself, after which her customer has no recollection of the event, be it traumatic or joyful. When the storm passes, she discovers that the winds took her magic with them, bankrupting her body of its stores.
Terrified about what will happen if people—especially the maniacal sheriff—find out, the Antidote agrees to take on a partner, a teenager named Asphodel Oletsky who needs money for her basketball team’s championship game and who is herself seeking answers to the mysterious murder of her mother. The two develop a con to hide the Antidote’s deficit, counterfeiting memories based on gossip and hearsay. From this modest setup, the book, nearly four hundred pages long, conjures a sweeping tale that encompasses the entire town, the point of view shifting chapter by chapter between these characters and others: Asphodel’s uncle Harp Oletsky, a Polish homesteader whose fields seem to be blessed with abundance despite the drought; Cleo Allfrey, a Black woman photographer working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration (RA) with a camera that inexplicably sees through time; Harp’s sentient scarecrow; the sheriff himself as well as, delightfully, his cat. Periodically the text is interspersed with actual photos from the time, many with an eerie black hole in them, which further evoke the setting along with Cleo’s work.
When I talk to Russell about it over Zoom from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she sits at a desk in what used to be her daughter’s nursery, she uses the word haunted to describe how the novel would not leave her, even when she put it aside for years to pen the novella Sleep Donation (originally published by Atavist Books in 2014, reissued by Vintage in 2020), the short stories that appeared in the collections Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf, 2013) and Orange World (Knopf, 2019), as well as the book and lyrics to the dance-driven music theater piece The Night Falls (2023), among other projects. Some of the stories from those collections, like “The Tornado Auction” in Orange World, about appropriating weather systems, or “Proving Up” from Vampires, a fairy tale about the Homestead Act of 1862, were inspired by her first trip to Nebraska and research into the Dust Bowl, respectively. Russell sees a direct bridge between her two novels in “The Dredgeman’s Revelation,” a chapter in Swamplandia! that tells of Louis Thanksgiving, employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression (also a source of employment for Russell’s grandfather) to work a barge that drains areas of the Florida Everglades, an attempt to transform the swamp into agricultural land. Their work was not successful, both historically and in Russell’s story, where enormous swamp vultures fight back, the land protecting itself.
“‘The Dredgeman’s Revelation’ is a fable of conquest, about what happens when humans fail to respect nature’s laws and limits, and the dangerous and destructive myths of ‘American Reinvention,’” Russell tells me. This land, home of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes, was taken and sold to newcomers to Florida—families like the fictional Bigtrees at Swamplandia!’s center, a white family who fabricate their Indigenous lineage—many of whom were poor and expected an American Eden. “It was a land scam,” Russell says, “but one predicated on real violence against a people and an ecosystem.”
It might have been the time period of “The Dredgeman’s Revelation” that brought her mind to the Dust Bowl, or it could have been Anne Marie Low’s Dust Bowl Diary (University of Nebraska Press, 1984), a book she read around the same time that captured her imagination, or perhaps it was an event from her childhood: riding out Hurricane Andrew in her grandfather’s bathroom in Miami Springs in 1992. “I remember the devastation the following day along with the somber joy of being alive,” she says. “We were fortunate, though. We had insurance and the ability to rebuild. Many people were literally swept off the map. That was an early lesson for me of what it means to exist under the hammer of weather and see how man-made hierarchies create, for some, precarity, while others have opportunity. That story is in many ways the history of the West, and you see it enacted in the Dust Bowl, too.”
She admits that while she can spot these influences now, what compelled her in the early years of the novel’s composition was elusive. “I think what it really was—and Swamplandia! touches on this idea too—is that there are things so painful to remember, these chapters of our very private histories, that if you could just tear them out and hand them to someone else, even temporarily, wouldn’t you do it?” In conversation, Russell is an active, luminous presence, her face animated and often in the process of smiling, but here she pauses, eyes sparkling with thought. “I don’t know anyone who, in our finite animal bodies, excels at knowing how to reckon with the past, certainly not on their own.”
In 2020, Russell put aside earlier drafts and rewrote The Antidote from scratch. Her research of this period pushed deeper into the history of the land on which Harp’s sentient scarecrow stands and led her to the scholarship of James Riding In, a member of the Pawnee Nation who, after serving in the Vietnam War, earned a PhD studying his people’s history in Nebraska. Retired from his position at Arizona State University, Riding In now directs the Pawnee Nation Digital Archive, Research Library, and Online Mukurtu Portal project, a public repository of materials related to Pawnee history, culture, language, and people. Riding In found that Russell had gotten far enough on her own to recognize that her understanding of the American settlement movement was in part erroneous and that she needed help to gain a better understanding of its truth. “The harsh reality is that historical propaganda whitewashes the devastating consequences of this country’s development on Indigenous peoples,” he says. “Visiting ancestral Pawnee lands with me gave Russell insightful glimpses of the places she writes about in The Antidote.”
“Riding In was very patient with my thousand questions,” Russell says. When she visited him, post-pandemic, she had already sold the novel to Knopf, but she continued to move slowly and carefully, following a desire to more fully inhabit the story and see firsthand the places she had only imagined. One of those places was the U.S. Indian Industrial School at Genoa. Another was the Milford Industrial Home for unwed mothers, where the Antidote spends time with other young pregnant women who have been sentenced to a year’s confinement, including a character who shares biographical details with the real woman known to many as Lost Bird, Zintkála Nuni, an infant survivor of the Wounded Knee Massacre who was stolen from her Lakota family by a white general and who spent a year at the Milford Home in 1908. Historically, both institutions operated within sixty miles of each other for decades in the early part of the twentieth century. The Indian Industrial School in particular, Russell explains, was a place of forgetting. “There were strategic attacks on Native children and their memory of culture and language. Children as young as five were kidnapped from their parents by government agents. These schools were part of federal law and often forcibly converted the children to Christianity.”
Inspired by her mentorship and friendship with Riding In, Russell asked if he would pen a Land Lost Acknowledgment, which appears at the end of the novel. These statements are not uncommon at certain embodied events, particularly within the academy, but having a written acknowledgment in a mainstream work of fiction is unique. When I ask Riding In about it, he replies that he trusted Russell because of the commitment she demonstrated to “learning, truth-telling, and depicting Pawnees as people, not derogatory stereotypes.” He goes on: “The fact is that the U.S. government took Pawnee lands, impoverished us by destroying our economy, stripped us of our freedom, and subjected us to a coercive policy of ethnocide as our population declined precipitously from the effects of colonization. It treated us as incompetent governmental wards lacking the mental capacity to handle our affairs. It allowed white settlers to push us from Nebraska to Indian Territory in the 1870s and commit crimes with immunity.” His Land Lost Acknowledgment expounds on this history, elevating what is typically a moment before an event into a profound and openhearted revelation of fact at the close of Russell’s novel, a historical document that makes clear that some of the darkest elements of Russell’s fantasy are not fabricated.
Within the narrative, these facts are part of the hidden memories of Uz, agreements that the earliest white homesteaders—including Harp Oletsky’s father—made about who would have power and land in the community, decisions with monstrous consequences that were then deposited with a prairie witch because they were too shameful to bear. The American buffalo, for instance, were systematically eradicated because, as a character puts it, “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Within decades the bison of the Plains were massacred to the brink of extinction—a photo in the book shows a mountainous pile of skulls that dwarfs the man at its base—a deliberate crime against the ecosystem perpetrated not only by settlers for sport and spite, but by the railroad companies and the U.S. government. Though Indigenous people had been growing crops on the Plains for centuries, new practices were put into place as tribal lands were carved into private homesteads that white settlers purchased from banks that mortgaged the stolen real estate, their fields tilled by tractors bought on credit from traveling salesmen, their crops unceasingly farmed in order to feed what was, at the turn of the twentieth century, a second Industrial Revolution. By the time of the Dust Bowl, the soil had been pulverized and loosened by industrial farming methods that abandoned soil conservation practices in favor of profit—a profit homesteaders were desperate for, given the economic hardships of the Great Depression and the predatory practices of corporate capitalism. It is fitting that the Black Sunday storm steals the Antidote’s trove of memories; it’s as if the land itself has come to exact justice from the people of Uz, as the giant vultures did for Louis Thanksgiving.
Though many of us know of this time from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, or the photographs of an RA photographer like Dorothea Lange, those don’t tell the entire story, or rather, they tell a particularly one-sided story. The black spots obscuring many of the photos in Russell’s book are not photoshopped; they come from the real-life head of the RA punching holes in the negatives, rejecting these images in favor of ones that depicted a stoic view of suffering white homesteaders in order to promote Roosevelt’s New Deal policies to voters, newspapermen, and lawmakers, who were all, for the most part, also white. The dispossession of land and attempted genocide and ethnocide of Native people occurs both concurrently and within living memory of those very tenant farmers and artists, but that’s a story many Americans have not heard because it was deliberately forgotten, not by magic, but by the white people who buried these facts systemically and institutionally, as well as within their family lore.
“I wanted to bridge these apocalypses,” Russell says, “to show the causal connection between American settler colonialism and the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl.” From years of talking and thinking about this, Russell knows that many white Americans consider these events so ancient they feel abstract. “I wanted to bring that abstraction home, because I’m part of that story, and I feel it every day. I ache because I feel complicit with these systems of domination and the status quo of a profoundly unjust world.”
In October 2024, President Joe Biden made a historic apology for the harm caused by the school at Genoa and others like it, and in December he designated the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania a national monument, part of his administration’s effort to educate Americans about these schools and memorialize the toll they exacted on Native lives and culture. Russell points to this as a sign of Americans awakening to history and seeking reparation, along with the Land Back movement, and conservation efforts by people like James Riding In’s niece Electa Leigh Hare, who works with the Pawnee Seed Preservation Project, a collaboration with Nebraska farmers that has raised Pawnee corn on Pawnee homelands again for the first time in one hundred fifty years. “One big lesson this book taught me is that social justice and ecological justice are in service of the same goal: a flourishing world,” Russell says. “It’s disastrous to pretend we can partition them.”
In the novel, Cleo Allfrey’s camera captures possible visions of the future as if the land is trying to both warn and inspire her, and Russell sees something like this happening now. “It’s not a mystical notion; it’s a true call-and-response of inner and outer ecologies,” she says. “People are dreaming new ways of how we might change our relationship to the Earth, as well as remembering older ones.” Again she pauses, her eyes sparkling with tears this time. “The great news that this book surprised me with came from meeting and traveling with people who are working on solutions in small and large ways. I truly believe that when you respect the processes of life on this planet, there is abundance for all.”
A fundamental inspiration for the novel is the book of Job—the name of Russell’s town, Uz, derives from Job’s home, the land of Uz. Job considers himself cursed when God takes away everything he loves, only to find, at the end of his travails, a truth beyond words, the revelation of a grander world of which he is only a small but not insignificant part. In The Antidote, Harp is a reverse-Job, blessed with an abundance built on what is essentially a devil’s deal, but the storm that upheaves his life shows him the truth, and this inspires Harp to want to collaborate with his neighbors for a better future. This is perhaps the most wondrous aspect of Russell’s novel: It doesn’t dwell in the maelstrom of despair but rather imagines the start of a reconciliation and reparation process, the first step of which is remembering. Like a synecdoche, the townsfolk’s many small, personal erasures echo the grander white American process of disregarding fact in favor of myth, or perhaps it’s more apt to say that the grand myth of American greatness is built on those many small, personal lies and omissions, just as our unjust societal systems, which seem abstract, are enforced, decision after decision, by human beings.
Russell tells me: “When researching, I asked people what their best-case scenarios for this country and this world might be and how we could get there. The answer was never, I want to own a fleet of boats, I want to triple my wealth, I want to sit on a heap of gold. Instead, everyone said it would be beautiful to have clean air and water and be together in spacious time. To feel like we are creating the kind of world we want to live in, to feel like we’re stewarding life, to feel like we’re restoring the world, to feel like we have a dynamic, loving role to play—that’s what people want, and that gave me real hope.”
Russell’s spouse, Tony Perez, who in addition to writing and editing also works with the nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper, suggests one final reason Russell needed time to bring her vision for this book to fruition, and that’s the perspective of motherhood. Of all the relationships she developed over the book’s writing, Perez says the arrival of their children in 2016 and 2019 may be the most important. “So much of the emotional core of The Antidote is informed by overwhelmingly powerful love,” he says. “I think she came to understand, on a personal level, the way people tend to justify the most horrendous and selfish things in the name of that particular love.”
Kids, Russell tells me, can be an alibi for perpetuating the worst behavior, for more deeply entrenching oneself in ideologies of selfishness, aggression, and individualism; indeed, the homestead was built around what today we would call the nuclear family, headed by a patriarch claiming ownership of land that he ferociously guards so that it can be passed down to the next generation. But parenthood doesn’t have to operate this way, Russell says. “Becoming a parent displaces you from the center of your own life. You now have this job caring for the future in such a direct way. It’s a small role to play in a very old, very long story.”
On the long road of composing this novel, Russell herself learned that we all have lives that are connected at the roots. “I need to trust a vaster community, because the future is not up to me, and yet our individualistic, predatory society has ingrained in us a mistrust of this very idea. That is the infrastructure I’ve been trying to pull out of myself.”
Pruning those ideologies is an ongoing process that takes patience and faith and will never end. That most human of acts, storytelling, can help, though. “I think that many people, like me,” she says, “are hungry for stories different than the ones we’ve been told.” With patience, collaboration, care, and vision, Russell has crafted a historical fantasy with a solid core of wisdom and truth, a radical parable of politics and poetry replete with the belief that there are more stories about how to live with one another and this planet than what many of us have been told, if only we take the initiative to recover and reinvent them.
Brian Gresko is a writer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York, who co-runs Pete’s Reading Series. Gresko is a founding member of Writing Co-Lab, a teaching cooperative.
