Fiction writing for me is a quilting together of ideas, feelings, experiences both actual and pretend, news stories read, stories overheard…it’s based on reality in the same way dreams are based on reality, where your sleeping mind grabs an image and a person and a location then mixes them all together with your imagination to make something entirely new and strange. Sometimes people ask if any characters or scenes are based on real people or times from Kamchatka. Since “Disappearing Earth” came out, I’ve had the incredible luck of getting to talk about the novel with people who’ve read it.

The Klyuchevskaya stratovolcano in Kamchatka. She remembers sleeping on horse blankets inside her grandparents’ yurt, “smelling the day’s sweat with fresh crushed grass trapped underneath.” The horses aged, their paces slowed, but the tundra kept the same shrill degree of emptiness.” At ten years old, she graduated to holding her own reins. The sun moved above them as they repeated that routine. When she was little, her parents tied her to the saddle with a rope around her waist, and every time she nodded off on her mare’s wide back, her father yelled her name to startle her awake. All the same, to reach them, Ksyusha’s family had to ride on horses for hours through plains and mountain passes. “In early summer, the herders drove the deer closer to the village, so the animals could graze on mosses only thirty kilometers from home instead of three hundred. One of “Disappearing Earth”’s characters is the daughter of a herding family and has sharp memories of school vacations spent in camps like these: People have been herding reindeer in Kamchatka for thousands of years. This photo is of reindeer herders resting at their camp outside the village of Anavgai. …Including central Kamchatka, which is more valley and tundra than urban shore. Reindeer herders resting outside the village of Anavgai, in Kamchatka.

Julia phillips author