Tim Weed is the author of “The Afterlife Project” and two previous books of fiction. He is the recipient of the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Montana Prize, the Fish International Short Story Award, and multiple Writer’s Digest Fiction Awards. He serves on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing and is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program. A former expert for National Geographic Expeditions, Tim spent the first part of his career directing international educational programs in Spain, Portugal, Australia, and Iceland. Tim grew up in Denver and Littleton, Colorado.
SunLit: Your previous book, “The Afterlife Project,” grew in some degree from a conversation you had with an astrophysicist as you cruised past Tierra del Fuego. That’s a tough act to follow but what’s the backstory for “The Gatepost”?
Tim Weed: You’re right about that being a tough act to follow! But in fact this book did also grow in part out of an international travel experience, this one in Oaxaca, Mexico, where I was researching the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in ancient Mesoamerican shamanism. I had a chance to interact with two very special traditional healers, or curanderas, and explored the profoundly evocative ruins of several Zapotec ceremonial centers, all of which set me on the path of writing “The Gatepost.”
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SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?
Weed: It’s the first chapter of the novel, introducing us to its main protagonist, Esme Weatherhead, who has returned to her childhood home in rural Vermont to write a book about her missing father. I figured that a first chapter is a good place to start. And I’m hoping that anyone intrigued by the story will preorder the book!
SunLit: “The Gatepost” incorporates psilocybin mushrooms and hallucination into the story. How does that both advance the plot and help you address larger themes like love, death and the resilience of life?
“The Gatepost”
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Weed: In “The Gatepost,” psilocybin-induced hallucinations are a major element of the plot because they become the central methodology in the search for Esme’s father. They also lead more or less directly to some of the characters’ big realizations about life, death, love, and nature.
I’ve long been interested in visions and hallucinations as portrayed in fiction. The point is not just that it’s fun to write from the perspective of characters experiencing an altered state (though it is), but also that one of the things fiction does best — its comparative advantage as a form of art and entertainment — is to portray the human interior landscape.
A big part of that inner landscape is the realm of the uncanny: dreams, visions, and the hallucinatory, archetypal-shadow side of human processing. This is something I think is worth a novelist’s attention, as it can lead to some very interesting places.
SunLit: “The Afterlife Project” incorporated time travel into the narrative, and your conversation with the astrophysicist helped you flesh out what that might look like. Where did you turn to gain an understanding of shamanism and hallucinatory substances like mushrooms?
Weed: My own direct experience for one thing, but that would take up a lot of space if I were to recount it here! There were also several books that were of central importance to my research, especially “The Road to Eleusis,” by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carla P. Ruck; “Plants of the Gods,” by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffman, and Christian Ratsch; “Woman Who Glows in the Dark,” by Elena Avila with Joy Parker; and “Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice,” by Mark J. Plotkin, PhD. To that I would add countless writings and recorded talks by such luminaries as Stanislaus Grof, Terence McKenna, John C. Lilly, Alan Watts, Paul Stamets, and Michael Pollan.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
Weed: Honestly, the most challenging thing was the idea of embarking on a follow-up to “The Afterlife Project.” As you know, that was in many ways a very dark story, and the making of it was an emotionally and creatively intense experience. I worried that it would be hard to replicate that, and that the resulting effort might be trivial or slight.
Once I got going, however, and understood that “The Gatepost” was just destined to be a different kind of story, I was able to relax into the writing of it and very much enjoy the work. My hope is that readers will have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
Weed: In part it’s similar to what I want them to take from “The Afterlife Project”: the idea that humanity has to come to terms with the truth that we don’t stand apart from or above the rest of life on Earth; that we’re part and parcel of it, and our destiny as a species is to become a steward species rather than an exploiter species.
But “The Gatepost” is about other things too: love, acceptance, and the need to sometimes just let go of our obsessions and fixations in order to move on with our lives — or, as the case may be, with our deaths.
SunLit: In “The Gatepost” you have characters exploring, and in at least one case becoming trapped in, a series of parallel worlds that may or may not be hallucinatory. Where did this idea come from?
Weed: Over the last several years I’ve become deeply fascinated by geological time, the staggeringly long history of this planet, and all the crazy forms of life that have populated these distant geological eras and epochs. I love thinking about this stuff, and I find the zoomed-out perspective that it provides about our time and its afflictions to be nothing short of exhilarating. Speculation about deep time was also a central driver of “The Afterlife Project,” but in “The Gatepost” another twist on time travel emerged having to do with both the Mesoamerican underworld and the Many Worlds Theory, or the multiverse.
Another obsession of mine, also central to “The Afterlife Project,” is the idea of an impossible or insurmountable separation between people who love each other. In the case of “The Gatepost” the separation is between a father and a daughter, not lovers. There are also lovers in this novel — in fact their love story is fairly central to the plot—but what separates them is not time or parallel worlds but the more easily surmountable barriers of class, money, and mistaken beliefs.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Weed: I’m working on a novel that’s been nagging me for quite awhile, provisionally titled “The Tour Guide,” a darkly comedic or at least fairly light-hearted espionage thriller set mostly in Havana and Nantucket. It’s based loosely on my experiences as a professional travel guide for National Geographic and other organizations. I’m also picking away at a collection of stories, provisionally titled “Tickets to the Reckoning,” and taking notes for another futuristic book, a potential sequel to “The Afterlife Project.”