Michael Zapata debut novel part 2

 Interview with Dan Bloom


You have had many experiences in your life connected with different religions and ethnic groups.
Your mother is Jewish, Ashkenasi, and your father, is from Ecuador. Where did your parents
first meet and what brought them together?
Michael Zapata: My parents met in 1975 in Quito, Ecuador, My mother was living there as a
foreign exchange student studying Spanish. They met outside my mother’s university and, even
though neither knew too much of the other’s language, they hit it off and were engaged three
months later during Carnival in Santa Fe, the small Andean farming village where my father
grew up. Their engagement and subsequent marriage in a courthouse in Quito was – for both of
their families – an act of rebellion!
In your 20s for one year in Chicago you ran an after-school center with socialist Catholic nuns!
 Can you tell me MORE about that experience? Any anecdotes? and did that experience enter
into the way you wrote the novel?
Michael Zapata: Before teaching high school re-enrollment, drop out students in Chicago, I ran
an afterschool center located in a Catholic school. I’m secular, half Latino, half Jewish, and the
nuns welcomed me with wide-open arms, some of whom fought fiercely and unapologetically
during the Civil Rights era and were then fighting for immigrants’ rights. That experience and
the subsequent decade of teaching impacted my understanding of activism, exile, American
exclusionism, and the liminal spaces in which those who are desplazados (displaced people)
exist.
Like many modern Jews in America and Europe these days, you are drawn more to Jewish
culture that to the Jewish religion and you are secular, and the novel explores these interlocking
identities too. For example, re Israeli/Russian during the February and October
Revolutions/American Jewish.
Michael Zapata: Definitely. As the whole known story goes, my paternal and maternal great-
grandparents fled one of those unspeakable pogroms at the turn of the 20 th century in the Russian
Pale of Settlement and emigrated to the United States. With them, of course, came both rich
religious and secular traditions, which, in part, replicated themselves as, yes, interlocking
identities, but also occasional fissures in my own family in Chicago.
In THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU, I was interested in questioning those fissures,
also viscerally and politically evident in the history of the Pale, the February and October
Russian Revolutions, Israel, and Jewish immigration to the United States. Still, what binds us to
thousands of years (and to each other) is a culture that advocates – and is anchored by – books
and questioning, profound Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick-like lines of questioning of existence or
endlessly mundane questioning such as the one thousand and one ways to best make a brisket.
After all, questioning leads to possibility, to parallel worlds and survival. My great-grandmother,
who I knew for some time as a child, was fond of calling people, including myself, luftmensch, a
Yiddish term of insult loosely meaning “someone with his head in the clouds,” or more tenderly,
for the novelist in me at least, as “someone who exists in a cloud of possibility.”
Does your novel has some aspects of climate fiction, especially as it pertains
to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and ''disaster capitalism.'' In fact your novel was featured
in a short review piece by Julie Cardalt in Climate Disaster list for Electric Literature recently
where she wrote: I WILL QUOTE SOME OF HER REVIEW HERE ...How did Julie come to
know about your book before most reviwers heard of it?
Michael Zapata: For many Americans, including myself, Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophic
canary-in-the-coalmine warning about just how much climate change was set to impact our
civilization in profound, material, and existential ways. The disaster capitalism that followed in
New Orleans, of course, views disaster and the subsequent profit made from one as the true
infrastructure of the world.
When late stage capitalist horrors and irreversible ecological disasters become too strangely easy
to recognize, when even everyday life offers visions of the end of the world, then the experience
of literature changes. In THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU, the mystery surrounding a
lost science fiction manuscript from 1930 is revealed in the near-apocalyptic devastation of post-
Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.
THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU was featured in Julie Carrick Dalton’s phenomenal
Electric Lit review All the Presidential Candidates Need to Read These Books About Climate
Disaster, and I was ecstatic and honored to be included in list with such luminary writers as
Richard Powers, Omar El Akkad, and Jesymn Ward, to name just a few. Julie reached out to me
after reading a – thankfully – glowing review of the novel in Publisher’s Weekly and we struck
up a conversation on climate change, ecology, displaced farm workers, and the writing life. I’m
madly anticipating her debut novel WAITING FOR THE NIGHT SONG, out in early 2021.
An excerpt of your novel will appear in Paper Brigade, the Jewish Book Council's Annual
Literary Journal, which will be released, I believe, in December, in the PRINT edition, so there
won't be an online link to it or will there? How did you arrange to have that excerpt placed in
PAPER BRIGAGE?
Yes, I’m very excited about this. The excerpt will be in print only, in Volume Four, to be
released February 2020. Paper Brigade was interested in publishing an excerpt after receiving a
galley of THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU.
Your novel is being published in February 2020  by  Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins. Do
you have an agent and did your agent bring the novel to the attention of the publishers and they
agreed to publish it? Can u name your agent or do you prefer to keep their name private?
Michael Zapata: I do have an agent, the always brilliant Chris Clemans at Janklow & Nesbit
Associates, whose enthusiasm and astronomical support through the years have been invaluable.
RE your Ecuadorian roots from your dad and your Jewish roots from your mom. can you tell
me A bit about yr mom and dad and growing up with two cultures in yr family.
Michael Zapata: My parents met in Quito, Ecuador, and, shortly after their marriage, they left
for Chicago. My sisters and I spent our childhoods navigating the construction of a new type of
identity and reality, half Jewish, half first-generation Latino, a bifurcated reality, and a new type
of language: Spanglish. We existed in a liminal space between continents and languages, a noisy,
messy, lonely, and often beautiful space.
If there's a Jewish story on every page of the San Diego Jewish World, I've found a good one.
I MGHT START MY ARTICLE LIKE THIS: Meet Michael Zapata a debut sci-fi novelist who is
Jewish on his mother's side of the family and Ecuadorian on his father's side. I came across him
during some recent literary detective work, when I discovered that he has written a new novel
titled "The Lost Book of Adana Moreau" which is set for publication nationwide in February.
Wanting to know more about his family background and the novel itself, I got in touch
with Zapata by email and asked him a few questions. He replied in internet time, that is to say,
right away, within the same day, from his home in Chicago to my home in Taiwan.
"To answer your question, yes, my new novel does deal directly with the Jewish experience pre
and post Russian Revolution, in Chicago during the Great Depression, and through the lens of
an Israeli-American raised in Chicago decades later," Zapata told me. "My mother's family is
Ashkenazi, originally from Lithuania, and my father's family is from Ecuador."
"Additionally, I'm happy to note, that an excerpt of my novel will be appearing in an upcoming
PRINT edition of ''Paper Brigade,'' the Jewish Book Council's Annual Literary Journal,"
he told me.
Zapata is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has lived in New Orleans, Italy, and Ecuador.
He currently lives in Chicago with his family. 
His novel, a sci-fi adventure, tells the story of a Latin American sci-fi writer and the lives her lost
manuscript unites decades later in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. It's being talked about
now as one of the most important books of 2020.
It goes like this: It's the year 1929 in New Orleans, and a Dominican immigrant named Adana
Moreau writes a science fiction novel titled ''Lost City.''
Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he
discovers a mysterious package containing a manuscript titled ''A Model Earth,'' written by none
other than Adana Moreau.
Who was Adana Moreau? How did Saul Drower’s grandfather, a Jewish immigrant born on a
steamship to parents fleeing the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, come across this
unpublished, lost manuscript? Where is Adana Moreau’s mysterious son, Maxwell, a theoretical
physicist, and why did Saul’s grandfather send him the manuscript as his final act in life?
Zapata’s debut sci-fi novel shines a breathtaking new light on the experiences of displacement
and exile in a story that is an example of brilliantly layered storytelling from a new literary light.
Could there be a Hollywood movie in the book's future? Time will tell.
ANY MORE DETAILS YOU CAN TELL ME?
Michael Zapata: *Just as a quick clarification note for your profile: the novel does deal with the
history of science fiction and the writing of science fiction, but is not science fiction itself.
Generally, although I’m not a science fiction writer, I love the experiment and challenge of
pulling together disparate genres (historical fiction, science fiction, autofiction etc) and
traditions.
I wrote THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU with one person in mind, my dear friend
Matt Davis who passed away in 2003, vocalist and guitarist for the band Ten Grand and one of
the founders of the Afro-Punk movement, who passed away tragically in 2003. He was one of
the most passionate, kind, and brilliant people I’ve ever known. My inspiration and intention was
to write a novel he would enjoy. I think I’ve been able to do that.
QUESTIONS:
How old are you now? Where were your born and raised? Chicago?
Michael Zapata: I’m 40. I was born in Chicago and raised in both Chicago and Roselle. After
writing for the stage and failed, if exceptionally fun, attempts at TV and film in my twenties, I
started writing fiction more seriously at the age of 29.
DO YOU visit Ecuador at time to see relatives?
Michael Zapata: Yes, I do! I’m fortunate to be close to my grandfather, who is 100, and visit
him in Santa Fe in addition my family in Guayaquil and Quito when I get the chance.
What kind of book tour will you do to promote your book?
Michael Zapata: HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press have been extraordinary in their support.
A national book tour, including festivals, will take me to Oxford, Jackson, New Orleans,
Milwaukee, Iowa City, Charlottesville, Boston, Manchester, with lots of great readings and
events, of course, in Chicago, including one with the Chicago Council on Science and
Technology in conversation with a physicist from FermiLab! More to come! Interested readers
can find updated info at: michaelzapata.com
Radio intervews, NPR? TV interviews? Chicago stations? Print newspaper interviews?
Michael Zapata: Very excited for print, podcast and radio interviews including the following:
Lit Hub, Thacker Mountain Radio at Off Square Books (on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and
Alabama Public Radio), The Other Stories Podcast, Biblio Happy Hour Podcast, Writers’ Voices
Podcast, NPR’s A Reading Life with Susan Larson, Writer’s Voice, with more to come!
ANy nibbles YET for translations to foreign languges like France or Germany or spanish?
HEbrew?
Michael Zapata: I’m not currently aware of any; however, it’s always been a dream of mine to
publish a novel translated into Spanish.
Any nibbles yet from MOVIE producers for options on the book?
Michael Zapata: So very mad fortunate to have film/tv agent Michael Cendejas at Lynn
Pleshette Agency in my corner for this. Fingers and neurons crossed!
Book will be out in hardback or paperback in February?
Michael Zapata: THE LOST BOOK OF ADANA MOREAU will be released in hardcover, e-
book, and audiobook (with the magnificent actress Coral Peña reading) on February 4 th , 2020.
ANything else you want to tell readers THROUGH this interview about youSELF or anout the
novel's story line? DISH.\
Michael Zapata: Please let me know if there’s any content/points above that you would like me
to expand upon! Thank you so much Dan! I really appreciate your time and interest. Cli-fi is
such a luminary genre/theme in literature today!