In Ron Tanner’s latest novel, “Kiss Me, Stranger,” we are thrown into a wild war torn unnamed country where it’s survival of the fittest. It’s the President’s Militia versus the Revolutionary militia and the citizens are forced to collect scrap metal to survive. Screaming Mimi’s screech across the sky, day and night, and people are hiding in landfills, starving and barely clothed.

 

We move through it all with Penelope, a mother of fourteen children, who takes us on a journey. Her husband and eldest son are drafted into the two opposing factions. The rest of the family has to work to keep alive in truly innovative ways.

 

The novel is filled with humorous illustrations of the president, called, The Man -- who is obsessed with Gregory Peck -- and First Lady Trudi, the woman of a thousand shoes and statues of her “dearly departed shih-tzus–she had dozens of them,” scattered throughout the streets.

 

Ron Tanner has brought us a post-apocalyptic tale, filled with his dark humor, of the psychosis of war and mass consumerism in our country.

 

Thanks, Meg. I’ve been playing with the alternate world of this story for a long time, actually since I was in grad school, when I published a story in this vein, called “The Last Draft.” It was about a guy drafted into a ridiculous civil war and he finds himself living in a trench dug into a landfill.

 

I’ve always been fascinated by garbage – that’s why I invented a country that’s built on landfill. I come from a family of scavengers.  My mother loved flea markets and my father loved surplus/salvage shops.  My two brothers and I were always bringing home odd finds, often from other people’s garbage.

 

I’ve written other stories about garbage. In fact, one of them is called “Garbage.”  I like the idea of having to make do with whatever you can find. So I created this extreme situation in “Kiss Me, Stranger” that compels my characters to be as smart as humans can be.

 

 

I’m glad the humor came through for you. I can’t take the post-apocalyptic thing too seriously; otherwise, it’d be too oppressive. I gave it an off-handed treatment to diminish the awfulness and focused, instead, on the absurdities.  So, yeah, I looked for opportunities to add quirky details instead.

 

 

 

I’m terrible at plots.  I knew I wanted the family to re-unite at the end (with the exception of the eldest son, who is still in the military), but I wasn’t sure how this would happen.  I wrote a number of endings, some with dramatic turns. But the one that stuck was the one that was most understated because, to me, that’s most like life.

 

 

 

I wrote the first draft of this in the late 1990s. News stories inspired it – stories of genocide, especially. It seems that humans are always at war someplace. It’s tiresome, really. And I wanted to say something about that. When writing, I try not to read books like the one I’m working on.

 

 

This is the first chapter, so it lays out most of the stuff you need to know.  I really liked hanging out with Penelope and the kids. They’re kind of my ideal family – they’re messy and often at odds, but they stay together no matter what.

 

 

It’s nice of you to complement my drawing. I’m a doodler.  I took art lessons as a child and fancied that I would be an artist one day.  But, then, in my teens I saw that I didn’t have what it takes to paint or draw professionally.  At about that time, writing entered my life -- it came much more easily than drawing.

 

 

Hemingway, Twain, Woolf, Hardy, and Joyce were important early on.  Vonnegut had a huge impact on me. The minimalists – Hemingway’s heirs, like Beattie and Carver – were influential too.

 

 

I’m usually reading several at a time, fiction and non-fiction, scattered about the house.  Fiction: Madison Smart Bell’s “The Color of Night,” Lars Martinson’s “Tonuharu” (graphic novel), Julia Glass’s “The  Widower’s Tale,” and Jaimey Gordon’s “The Lord of Misrule.”