Ben Nadler

Prairie Ashes tells the story of the 1930s Illinois Mine War from the perspective of its narrator, Barb Massacre, in 1986. For me the intervening years–as well as the years since–are full of important things suggested by the novel. It’s just the sort of book that makes you want to ask the author a bunch of questions. So I reached out to Ben Nadler to see if I could get a bunch of answers.

Norman Feliks: Writing historical fiction requires a lot of reading, not just to be true to events but to render the voices and finer details of a different time and place. For example, you include fictional media such as union newsletter and short story excerpts that ring true.

Ben Nadler: The book is based in primary source research. I was fortunate to receive a fellowship from The Illinois Historical Society to go to Springfield, Illinois and work in the archives in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. The 1930s were a very print-intensive era, so even though I’m sure a lot of documents were discarded or crumbled apart, there’s still a wealth of materials like union newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets, and other print ephemera that has been preserved.

I also made use of the oral history collections held at The University of Illinois at Springfield. They have collections from the Oral History Office at Sangamaon State, which was their predecessor institution. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, the office recorded collections of oral histories in Illinois communities, and a few of these relate directly or indirectly to the Mine War. I wasn’t able to go to the UIS library, due to COVID, but the tapes were digitized. Being able to hear the actual voices of people who lived through the period helped me understand the story, but it also helped me figure out how to construct characters’ voices.

The research method became the writing method too. Even though I was writing a fictional story, I didn’t let myself write anything that couldn’t potentially exist in the archives, in terms of content, form, vocabulary, or anything else.

Did you start with the story you wanted to tell and find source materials to fit or did you start with the general topic and the story emerge as you did your research?

The form and content were very intertwined. I knew I was telling a story about a political murder, and everything that led up to and followed this killing. I asked myself, who would be alive to tell the story of this shooting? The victim’s nephew, it turned out. So, I started writing from the nephew, Maguire’s, perspective, using the form of an oral history tape. Then I asked myself, who would be interviewing Maguire in 1986? Who would be listening to this story? So, I started writing the character of Barb. And so on. I just kept pulling the strands.

I enjoyed the structure of having a first-person narrator who interrogates her own degree of unreliability for us, not to mention her own research methods. Did you have any literary influences?

I was influenced by a lot of different past-facing fiction. A few novels that come to mind:

John Williams wrote a book called Augustus that tells the story of the Roman emperor through fragments. Instead of trying to fully recreate or animate the ancient past, which wouldn’t ring true, he accessed it through pieces of text. People talk about Stoner when they talk about Williams, but Augustus is a much more interesting book.

A more recent influence is Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox. In that book, a contemporary professor discovers an unpublished 18th-century manuscript about the famous London thief Jack Sheppard, and this functions as a way to encounter suppressed queer history. I’m not doing the book justice with that summary, but it was influential in my thinking about how different modes of narration from different time periods could comment on each other.

A less-direct–but no less powerful–influence was Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. This is a very different type of book, since it’s speculative fiction, a time travel novel. The narrator of that book is a Black woman in 20th-century California who travels back and meets her enslaved (and slave-owning) ancestors in Maryland in the 1800s. I admired how Butler found a way for her character to encounter and confront the past.

Barb is a punk who spent some time drifting. Her ex, Raph, shared her radicalism. Is Barb’s punk sensibility part of why she’s intrigued by the union militants whose story she tells?

As someone who grew up in punk rock myself, I always felt there was a tension in punk between wanting to rip everything up and start again, and wanting to form connections to older radical and counter-culture lineages. Barb, as a runaway punk kid in the ‘80s, is repulsed by the adults around her who are greedy yuppies and ineffectual hippies. But she’s also driven to connect with an older generation who had relatable experiences like riding freight trains, or shared perspectives like forms of anarcha-feminism.

The structure of the book is also connected to Barb’s “punk sensibility.” She’s building her own archive, but she’s doing it by cutting and pasting. She’s making a giant punk rock zine.

You have a family connection to the book.

Yeah, my mother is from Christian County, Illinois, where the core historical events of the novel take place. Her family came over from Kentucky before the Civil War, so her roots there are pretty deep. Her father was a coal miner for a bit, after he got back from World War II.

I mainly grew up around Philadelphia, but we would go to Illinois most summers, and I’d spend time with my mom’s aunts and uncles, listening to their stories. So I’m an outsider, I’m not from there, but I spent a lot of time there, and I do have a strong connection to the region.

One of the relatives we would stay with was my great-aunt Jessie, my grandfather’s older sister. Jessie’s husband, Virgil, was a miner who died long before I was born. My mother was close with him when she was younger. Anyway, in Jessie’s scrapbook she kept a clipping about Virgil’s uncle, Melville Staples, a Progressive organizer who was shot and killed in Springfield during the Mine War. That story always stuck with me, and planted the seed for writing this book, decades later.

Barb looks back from 1986. Red-baiting plays a role in the novel and I was wondering if her vantage three years before the Berlin Wall fell was a conscious choice? We’re also situated midway through Ronald Reagan’s second term…

I felt, as I was writing the book, that I was dealing with history just beyond my reach. Because of that, it made sense to bring the book up to the edge of my own life. I was born in 1984, so I lived in Reagan’s America, but don’t have strong, coherent memories of it.

Politically, though, yes, the idea that the three generations in the book brought the reader from the First Red Scare, through the Second Red Scare, and almost to the end of the Cold War, was something I was very conscious of. The Radicalism of the ‘30s flourished between two moments of intense repression (and two World Wars). There actually was Communist Party/Comintern presence in the coal industry in the ‘30s—that wasn’t entirely a paranoid fantasy—but the type of red-baiting described in the book was more about people in power using the threat of Communism as a pretense to suppress any dissenting voices.

It’s interesting you mentioned the Berlin Wall. I wrote part of the book while living in Berlin. I was in Kreutzberg, which is a neighborhood on the edge of West Berlin, and I’d ride my bike across the Oberbaum bridge into East Berlin, and think about how there used to be checkpoints there. That Berlin geography is part of why I ended up with the character of Gerhard, a German Jewish refugee who meets Maguire’s mother in the ‘40s. I was seeing the streets where he would have come from, and thinking about the failed November Revolution in Germany at the end of WWI.

I’m thrilled you brought that up. The revolution would never have stood a chance without the union Shop Steward movement and mass strikes. If it had succeeded it might have prevented the conditions that led to the usurpation of the Weimar Republic.

For sure. That question of “what if it had succeeded” drove a lot of the book. I was wondering: What if the German Revolution had succeeded? What if the Progressive Miners movement had succeeded more totally? What if a lot of different liberatory movements of the inter-war years had succeeded?

When I was a kid, my father’s parents would often speak about their friends from New York City who had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. My grandparents believed that if the Spanish Republicans had succeeded, fascism could have been stopped earlier and more decisively. The Shoah wasn’t inevitable. None of the horrors of the 20th century were… Prairie Ashes isn’t an alternative history novel–I’m not even sure it’s a historical novel–but it’s driven by the premise that the world we’ve inherited didn’t have to be like this, and that these national narratives could have gone a different way. Another world might have been possible…

You made me think about patriotism. Barb notices that Maguire has military history books but no labor history. Even Cartwright–whose seminal union education came in the borderless Industrial Workers of the World–and who went to hear the anti-war Eugene Debs speak–enlisted in the army.

I had Cartwright follow a common trajectory of the era: A lot of men who were involved in the Wobblies and pre-WWI socialist movements in America got swept up in the war mobilization. Some were drafted, and some felt social pressure to serve, and some really bought into the surge of nationalism. For example, Henry McGuckin, who wrote the classic and beautiful Memoirs of a Wobbly, enlisted to fight in WWI after his Wobbly days. Similar stories played out in Europe too.

More broadly, though, as I was writing, I was wrestling with the way American nationalism (which I think patriotism is usually a euphemism for) devours movements and history. Part of the reason I wanted to write the book in the first place was because I was seeing Trumpism repurpose working class American history (and coal mining history, in particular) in ways that bothered me. I was also trying to make sense of seeing people who were involved in things like the anti-Iraq War movement get swept up in the nationalism of the Trump era.

Cartwright learned about the labor movement during his IWW days. Maguire tells Barb that, “Education, to Cartwright, was meant to help a working man rise with his class, not from his class.” Barb rhapsodizes about a march of 10 000 PMA Ladies’ Auxiliary members: “How is it no one told me rural Illinois was once filled with badass babes/militant feminists who read anarchist newspapers?” You’re an academic. Talk about the white collar/blue collar worker divide in terms of education.

All of my personal experience with union membership and organizing has been in the context of higher education. As an educator (both adjunct and full-time), I’ve been a member of different unions affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and/or the National Education Association. When I was a grad student, Teaching Assistants were left out of the professors’ union, so we were organized by the Communication Workers of America.

I remember one time, with the CWA, we had a picket line to support striking T-Mobile workers at a retail store in suburban upstate New York. So the striking workers were retail workers, and then the two locals there to support them were us (the graduate students) and lineworkers from the phone company. That really illustrated for me that all these different types of labor are labor. I think, historically, the elitism of academics and other white collar workers has been exploited to convince us we aren’t in it with blue collar workers, or retail workers for that matter. And of course, teaching in an air-conditioned school is not as hard on the body as other types of labor like climbing telephone poles or working in a coal mine, but it’s not good for anybody to draw these lines between us.

Another aspect of that artificial divide is the perception that academic disciplines, especially the humanities, are esoteric, privileged, ivory tower endeavors that aren’t relevant to working people. But art, literature, history, philosophy–these things belong to everyone. Cultural education played a huge role in early-20th-century labor movements. In the book, for example, I have scenes where striking miners perform theatre written by other union members.

In the same vein, talk about the rural/urban divide.

That divide also functions very differently in the world of the book than the world of today, because the whole geography of urbanization, deindustrialization, suburbanization, etc. has changed over the past century. Back in the 1930s, my urban, New York City relatives were mostly involved in the garment industry. My rural, Illinois relatives were all in coal country (whether they were mining coal or working on farms). These feel like very different family histories to me, but both sides of my family were involved in the labor movement of the 1930s, in the context of their own regions and trades. It was important to me that the scope of the novel be expansive enough to bring in both of these contexts, and to show them as parts of one connected movement and world.

As I write this, businesses and unions, in addition to myriad progressive groups, have shut Minneapolis down to protest ICE. Barb writes that “everything was possible in 1932.” What would she think about 2026?

It’s an interesting question! Minneapolis is Barb’s hometown after all, and it’s under attack by fascists. For me at least, when I write a novel, I leave the characters within the confines of the book’s scope, and don’t know for sure what happens to them afterward. If Barb were still alive in 2026, she’d be in early 60s. I’d like to think she’d be out in the streets working with people, offering mutual aid, still fighting the good fight.

John L. Lewis, probably the most powerful labor leader in US history, is your embodiment of where “Big Labor” diverges from working folk and worker democracy. I felt his giant eyebrows loom over me as I read.

John L. Lewis is central to the story of the United Mine Workers, and as you point out, to American labor history in general. For the characters in my book, he was the face of a lot of centralization and corruption that undermined the legacy of the coal miners’ movement, even if he had earlier helped build it. Now, to be clear, none of this is a knock on the UMW, who have an amazing history, and are still around and do a lot of awesome stuff today. The UMW corruption came to a head in the 1970s with Lewis’ successor, Tony Boyle, and a lot of positive reforms were made after he went to prison for murder.

As a past-facing fiction writer though, I wasn’t interested in trying to animate or reenact the lives of well-documented historical figures. I’m not Gore Vidal. I was much more interested in creating new, original characters of my own who existed in these historical conditions. There are some real people—like the journalist and activist Thyra Edwards—who pop up here and there, but there’s not much of that. So, I very consciously did not want to try to actually portray Lewis directly. He’s just present in the book through word of mouth and print, never in the flesh.

That was one of the strengths of the narrative structure, the feeling that those with power loom, just out of reach.

The heroes in Prairie Ashes are not underdogs who become heroes by winning. A mass movement can’t succeed without many people who persist even though they know they might lose. I think you conveyed the nobility of that.

Yeah, I guess it’s a book about losing. About fighting really hard and still losing. I always think of that Lou Reed line: “something flickered for a minute, then it vanished and was gone.” I’d like to think that there is “nobility,” like you say, or beauty, or at least something worth mentioning, in that minute of flickering rebellion. Hope is inherently tied up with the future, but for some reason I don’t fully understand, I wrote a book trying to locate hope in the past. I’m paraphrasing a paraphrase here, but Kafka said that there is infinite hope in the world, just not for us.

Hey, you know as a Canadian I get down with beautiful losers. Rest in peace, Leonard Cohen. Thanks for your time, Brother. Solidarity Forever. An injury to one is an injury to all. United we stand, divided we fall.

Norman Feliks is a member of IATSE Local 873 and the Industrial Workers of the World. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and a Master of Industrial Relations degree from Queen’s University, Canada. He has written book reviews for Broken Pencil and Fanzine. He lives in Toronto.